Ransom (20 page)

“He’s a genius at it. He once got rid of the Vice-President when he was up here telling me how to run the city.” Michael Forte smiled for the first time since Malone had entered the room. “If I’m re-elected tomorrow, maybe I should put him on to slum clearance.”

“I thought that was what he was doing then,” said Malone; then gestured, “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“Inspector,” said Sam Forte, standing up for the first time and walking slowly about the room; his calmness had been

no more than self-control and now his limbs were stiff with the effort, “each of those men has his problems. They are the wages of our system. We like to think it’s the best system in the world. It isn’t - but as Joe Burgmann said, don’t quote me - but I don’t know of any other that would work any better in this country. The ideal might work, but unfortunately idealism has a natural enemy- human nature.”

“Around this time of night,” said Michael Forte, “my father tends to get cynical but honest. It’s when I love him most.”

“In politics this is the only hour for honesty. But something in your face, Inspector, tells me you already know that.”

“I’ve had experience of it,” said Malone, but he wasn’t going to elaborate on his own cynicism about Australian politics.

Michael Forte had been watching Malone and now he said abruptly, “Where did you really go tonight? I mean, before you finished up at The Tombs?”

“Police Headquarters,” said Malone, not blinking an eye.

Forte shook his head. “No, I called there after I’d called the house. When I talked to my son I had the feeling he was holding something back from me. Was he?”

“Yes,” Malone admitted. “Don’t blame him- I told him to keep his mouth shut. I went to see Frank Padua.”

“Jesus!” Forte thumped his desk with his fist. “Don’t you know when to leave things alone?”

“Ordinarily - yes. But this is different - my wife’s in danger and I couldn’t care less what happens to you and your bloody city!”

“What’s all this about?” Sam Forte said.

His son told him, then looked back at Malone. “And I suppose you got nowhere? I just hope to Christ you didn’t let him think Pd sent you - “

“He knows who sent me - you don’t have to worry. We had a bit of a donnybrook, but it paid off.” Malone then narrated the events of the evening. “Jefferson and I have

got this small clue about Latrobe. It may mean nothing, but it’s as much as anyone else has dug up. We want to go out and check it. Unless you want me to turn it over to the FBI and the Police Department?”

Michael Forte looked at his father, who spread his hands, not wanting to make the decision. You old bastard, Michael suddenly thought: all my life you’ve been pushing me, but never once have you laid your neck on the line, not even now. He looked back at Malone, suddenly prepared to listen to the Australian. “What do you want to do?”

“If I were working on my own, I’d turn it over to them -I wouldn’t know my way around. But I think John Jefferson is a bloody good officer - at least he and I get on with each other and he wants to wrap this up almost as much as I do. If it leads to something definite, then it will be a bigger job, too big for us, and we’ll turn it over to the Police Department at once. But first I’d like a crack at it with Jefferson. All my working life I’ve been a cop and this to me is the most important case I’ve ever had. I don’t want to sit on my arse worrying myself stiff while someone else works on it.”

When Malone had gone Michael Forte looked at his father, then up at the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece. Ten minutes to two: seven hours and ten minutes to the absolute deadline. “It’s a crazy time to be making a broadcast. If the kidnappers are as tired as I am, they’ll be asleep.”

“You’re awake because you’re worried. They could be worried too. What are you going to say in the broadcast?”

“Whatever I say, it won’t be political, so don’t be disappointed. I had enough of that, at least for tonight, when I was down at the Biltmore a couple of hours ago.”

As he had come down into the hotel lobby, escorted by Manny Pearl and Joe Burgmann and half a dozen of the

senior campaign workers, he had been besieged by reporters and spur-of-the-moment well-wishers among the hotel guests. The maelstrom had swung him round and he had found himself looking up at the famous clock.

Beneath it several generations of college lovers had met for dates; his own class at Harvard had regarded it as a stopwatch on romance. The record for getting a girl from under the clock and into a bed in one of the rooms upstairs had been nine minutes; he had never been interested in records and at college had been a shy slow lover. By the time he met Sylvia he was no longer at college, though she was at Barnard. He had met her only once here in the lobby and that had been on an election eve just like tonight, the night before he had been elected Congressman for the first time. He had never asked her if she had ever met anyone else beneath the clock, because she never would have told him if she had. It had been part of an unspoken agreement between them that they had never mentioned past love affairs. Despite their disagreements and rows there had been for him no other women in his life: love began and ended with her. Looking up at the clock tonight he had made a decision.

“If Sylvia is not returned alive tomorrow, I’m resigning as Mayor - whether I’m voted in or not.”

“Don’t start thinking about that now - that can wait - “

Michael shook his head. “No, I’m telling you now. If my political future is just between you and me, then it will be over tomorrow. I don’t want any more of it.”

The planning of his son’s career had not always been smooth going for Sam Forte. He saw the danger signs again and he adopted the same approach as always: you never won arguments with Michael by fiercely disagreeing with him. He had inherited his mother’s Calabrian temper when it came to argument; Sam knew it would be his son’s major weakness if ever he became President. Sam himself had a temper, but it had long gone cold, the fire of it dampened down by his rigid control. He stood with his back to the

fireplace, looked round the room as if he were inspecting it for the first time, then back at Michael.

“And if Sylvia comes back safely - as I’m sure she will - ?”

“What makes you so sure?” But then Michael made a gesture of dismissal. “Never mind - that’s just another one of your political statements. You always hedge your bets, don’t you? What hedge have you got if I don’t go through with what you’ve spent all these years planning?”

“None at all,” said Sam softly. “Neither has Sylvia. We are both depending on you.”

Michael looked as if he were about to swear, then thought better of it. He twisted his mouth, the unspoken words bitter in it, and turned his head away. I’ve won, thought Sam; but managed to feel some pity for his son.

Michael could feel the petit mat of boyhood coming back: the old, almost forgotten feeling of detachment gripped him. He was in this room yet not of it; at the edge of his consciousness a white-haired man, faintly familiar, lifted a commanding arm. The floor seemed to move and rumble beneath his feet, yet his feet felt as if they were resting on nothing but air: but his whole life had been built on a foundation just as insubstantial. He did not need to move his head to look around the room; he saw it whole from the outside while still in it. Though he had never listened to it before, he could now hear the ormolu clock ticking: four years ticked away while the minute hand did not move. Voices rang in the room and in his skull, echoes of memories that he could not quite grasp. Suddenly the room was gone: he stood in a grey emptiness, an infinity of nothingness. He heard a moan in his head, the room spun round, then there was a sharp blow on his jaw and a frightening confusion.

He blinked and looked up, lost and dazed. He lay on the floor between his desk and his chair. The white-haired man, whom he now recognized again as his father, was bending over him. He heard a door open and slam, then Manny Pearl was crouched beside him.

“Mike! Mike, are you all right?”

He sat up, felt his jaw. “Did I faint?”

“It was one of those seizures you used to have as a boy.” Sam Forte himself looked on the point of collapse; he sat down heavily in the nearest chair. “You made a terrible gurgling noise, then just fell out of your chair.”

Michael, assisted by Manny Pearl, got to his feet and moved across to lie down on the couch. “I must have cracked my jaw as I fell.” He took the glass of water Pearl offered him, looked up at the little man’s strained face. “I’ll be all right. It was probably just exhaustion brought it on.”

“We had doctors, the best, look at him when he was young,” said Sam Forte. “They said there was probably a little damage to the skull when he was being born. Nothing, they said, it happens to lots of babies.”

“Maybe we better take you home, Mike, get you to bed.”

“I have to make that broadcast - “

“Someone else can do it for you. Pat Brendan or Des Hungerford. Maybe even your father.”

Sam Forte shook his head. “Not me. Can I have a glass of that water, Manny?”

“You look almost as bushed as Mike.” Manny Pearl poured a glass of water for the old man, looked at him and his son: he could have been another son and a brother, so concerned was he for them. He had dedicated himself to Michael Forte and not just for political reasons. He had a natural warmth of affection, but too much of his life had been spent in an atmosphere where friendship, if it wasn’t suspected or spurned, was only an instrument to be used. Then he had met Michael Forte and the Italian rich boy and the Jewish delicatessen owner’s son had discovered how much they had in common; a respect and a deep liking for each other had soon made itself felt. Wherever Mike went from now on, to the White House or oblivion, Manny hoped he would take him with him. “Maybe Pat Brendan would be best.”

“No.” Michael sat up, recovered now. His powers of

recovery had always been exceptional, his stamina that of a football tackle or, as he was, the complete politician. Or almost complete, he thought … “I have to do it myself. The kidnappers won’t take much notice of anyone else. I’ve done little enough as it is. I just wish now I’d gone with Malone.”

“You could lose your job over this,” said Malone.

“Maybe,” said Jefferson, holding the car steady against the cross-wind as they came up out of the Queens Midtown Tunnel on to the Long Island Expressway. The storm showed no sign of abating; the wind and the rain seemed to have become stronger and heavier. There was little traffic on the expressway and what there was of it was slowed almost to a crawl. “The rumour is that the Commissioner himself could be out of a job after tomorrow’s elections. If he gets the axe, he’s not gonna be worried about me.”

“You don’t sound worried.”

“I am, though. For your wife and Mrs Forte.” He glanced sideways at Malone. “It’s all of a sudden become as personal for me as it is for you.” Then he saw the strain in Malone’s face, the pain in the eyes as the Australian looked at him, and he amended what he had said: “Well, not quite. But almost.”

Malone knew that he did not have to thank the black man for his commitment; they had reached a stage where words were becoming less and less necessary. When he had come out of the Mayor’s office Jefferson had been waiting for him. He had grabbed Malone’s arm and hustled him through the crush of inquiring reporters.

“Inspector Malone will be in my office up at Headquarters,” Jefferson had said. “Tell your guys up there they can see him in ten minutes. But he’s saying nothing just now.”

Once down in Jefferson’s car Malone had looked at him. “Is that where we’re going - Headquarters?”

“No. I don’t think anyone is gonna come out in this rain to tail us up there - they’ll just call their own boys who are already there, the regular police beat men. We’ll go up to Headquarters eventually, but not just now.”

Now, out on Long Island, Malone said, “Where do we go first?”

“We’ll try the local precinct house. They’d know where the high school principal lives - I guess they have as much trouble with the kids out here as they do in most places.”

They pulled up outside the precinct house, looked out at the swirling rain lit by the green bowl of the light above the door.

“Can you swim underwater?” Jefferson said. “Makes me think we’re gonna step out into an aquarium.”

They ran through the rain, finished up in a room empty of people but for the duty sergeant dozing at the front desk. He straightened up, stiffening a little as the two wet strangers came bursting in. Jefferson produced his badge and the sergeant, a burly man with a nimbus of red hair round a freckled scalp, nodded and looked with interest at Malone.

“That’s why I’m alone here - everybody else is out prowling around looking for your wife, Inspector, and the Mayor’s.”

“You can see we’re really trying,” Jefferson said to Malone. “I don’t think the kidnappers are out of the New York area, but we sent out the usual 13-state alarm- that links us with all the State and local police right up and down the eastern seaboard.”

“But I gotta be frank,” said the sergeant, “I don’t think they’re gonna find much till this storm lets up. The high school principal ? Sure, I know him. My kid goes there. His name’s Hellibrand. You want me to call him first? He mightn’t open his door, you knock on it this time of night.”

While the sergeant dialled the high school principal’s

number, Malone looked about him. It was just like home: even the pictures on the walls could have been the same, except there were more black portraits here than there had been back in the police station at Randwick, in Sydney, where he had first started on the beat. There were the usual scuffed desk and chairs: nothing from any police supply depot ever seemed to have been new: everything was created as an instant antique. There was a framed picture of the American flag high up on one wall, too high evidently for it ever to have been cleaned: the Union was badly fly-speckled, some of the stars almost obliterated, the stripes fragmented. There were graffiti scribbled on the walls, none obscene enough to warrant scrubbing off; and there was a framed notice that spelled out in large letters: Your Rights. Jefferson nodded at it.