The Danger Read online

  “But you yourself are working,” I pointed out. “And I’ll reach him, somehow.”

  He gave me his schedule of times on and off duty, which I wrote down.

  “You’ve done marvels, Enrico,” I said warmly, near the end. “I do congratulate you. It must be worth promotion.”

  He laughed shortly, both pleased and unhopeful. “This Goldoni has still to be caught.” A thought struck him. “In which country, do you think, will he be brought to trial?”

  “On his past record,” I said dryly, “nowhere. He’ll skip to South America as soon as the police get near him here, and next year maybe a polo player will be snatched from out of a chukka.”

  “What?”

  “Untranslatable,” I said. “Goodbye for just now.”

  I telephoned immediately to Kent Wagner’s headquarters and by dint of threats and persuasion finally tracked him to the home of his niece, who was celebrating her birthday with a brunch.

  “Sorry,” I said; and explained at some length.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Who is this guy Pucinelli?”

  “A good cop. Very brave. Talk to him.”

  “Yeah.”

  I gave him the telephone numbers and Enrico’s schedule. “And the Goldonis are going to New York,” I said. “Mrs. Goldoni told me. I think they’re going today. They’ve been staying here at the Regency.”

  “I’ll get onto it right away. Will you be at the Sherryatt still?”

  “Yes, I’m there now.”

  “Stay by the phone.”

  “O.K.”

  He grunted. “Thanks, Andrew.”

  “A pleasure, Kent,” I said, meaning it. “Just catch him. He’s all yours.”

  As soon as I put the receiver down there was a knock on the door, and I was already opening it before it occurred to me that perhaps I should start to be careful. It was only the maid, however, on my doorstep; short, dumpy, middle-aged and harmless, wanting to clean the room.

  “How long will you be?” I said, looking at the cart of fresh linen and the large vacuum cleaner.

  She said in Central-American Spanish that she didn’t understand. I asked her the same question in Spanish. Twenty minutes, she said stolidly. Accordingly I lifted the telephone, asked the switchboard to put any calls through to me in the lobby temporarily, and went downstairs to wait.

  To wait—and to think.

  I thought chiefly about Beatrice Goldoni and her excited guilt. I thought of her son, banished from his father’s house. I thought it highly likely that it wasn’t a lover Beatrice had been sneaking off to meet in Washington that Friday, but a still beloved black sheep. He would have set it up himself, knowing she was there for the race, and still feeling, on his part, affection.

  For a certainty she didn’t know he was the kidnapper of Alessia and Freemantle. She hadn’t that sort of guile. She did know, however, that it had been I who’d negotiated Alessia’s ransom, because at that Friday breakfast Paolo Cenci had told her. What else he had told her, heaven knew. Maybe he had told her also about Dominic: it wouldn’t have been unreasonable. Many people didn’t understand why Liberty Market liked to keep quiet about its work, and saw no great harm in telling.

  I had myself driven Beatrice into Washington; and she talked, always, a lot. Chatter, chatter, we’re here with the Cencis, you remember Alessia who was kidnapped . . . and there’s a young man with her, the one who came to Italy to get her back safely . . . he’s here because of this other kidnapping . . . and Paolo Cenci told us he rescued a little boy called Dominic in England . . . Alessia was there too . . . chatter, chatter, chatter.

  I stood up from the lobby sofa, went to the desk, and said I was checking out; would they please prepare my bill. Then I got through again to Kent Wagner, who said I’d just caught him, he was leaving the brunch.

  “You sure as hell broke up my day,” he said, though sounding philosophical. “Thought of something else?”

  I said I was leaving the Sherryatt, and why.

  “Jee-sus,” he said. “Come down to headquarters; I’ll put you into a good place where Goldoni would never find you . . . it’s sure prudent to assume that he does now know you exist.”

  “Might be safer,” I agreed. “I’m on my way.”

  The desk said my account would be ready when I came down with my gear. The twenty minutes was barely up, but when I stepped out of the lift I saw the maid pushing her cart away down the passage. I unlocked my door and went in.

  There were three men in there, all in high-domed peaked caps and white overalls, with International Rug Co. Inc. on chests and backs. They had pushed some of the furniture to the walls and were unrolling a large Indian-type rug in the cleared free center.

  “What . . .” I began. And I thought: it’s Sunday.

  I spun on my heel to retreat, but it was already too late.

  A fourth man, International Rug Co. Inc. on his chest, was blocking the doorway; advancing, stretching out his arms, thrusting me forcefully backwards into the room.

  I looked into his eyes . . . and knew him.

  I thought in lightning flashes.

  I thought: I’ve lost.

  I thought: I’m dead.

  I thought: I meant to win. I thought I would win. I thought I’d find him and get him arrested and stop him, and it never seriously occurred to me it could be this way round.

  I thought: I’m a fool . . . and I’ve lost . . . I thought I would win, and Brunelleschi . . . the danger . . . has beaten me.

  Everything happened very fast, in a blur. A sort of canvas bag came down over my head, blocking out sight. I was tripped and tossed by many hands to the floor. There was a sharp sting in my thigh, like a wasp. I was conscious of being turned over and over . . . realized dimly that I was being rolled up like a sausage in the Indian rug.

  It was the last thing I thought for quite a long while.

  I WOKE UP out of doors, feeling cold.

  I was relieved to wake up at all, but that said, could find little else of comfort.

  For a start, I had nothing on.

  Sod it, I thought furiously. True to bloody form. Just like Alessia. Morgan Freemantle . . . he too, I dared say, was currently starkers.

  Liberty Market’s own private unofficial training manual, issued to each partner on joining, spelled it out: “immediate and effective domination and demoralization of the victim is achieved by depriving him/her of clothes.”

  Dominic had had clothes: they’d even added a jersey to his tiny shorts. Dominic, on the other hand, was too little to find anything humiliating in nakedness. There would have been no point.

  The only thing to do was to try to think of myself as dressed.

  I was sitting on the ground; ground being loamy earth covered with fallen leaves. I was leaning against the tree from which most of the said leaves appeared to have descended: a small tree with a smooth hard trunk no more than four inches in diameter.

  The view was limited on every side by growths of evergreen; mostly, it seemed to me ironically, of laurel. I was in a small clearing, with only one other youthful tree for company. Beech trees, perhaps, I thought.

  The main and most depressing problem was the fact of being unable to walk away on account of having something that felt like handcuffs on my wrists, on the wrong side of the tree trunk, behind my back.

  It was quiet in the clearing, but beyond I could hear the muffled constant roar which announced itself as city. Wherever I was, it wasn’t far out. Not nearly as far, for instance, as Laurel. More like a mile or two . . . in a suburb.

  I opened my mouth and yelled at the top of my lungs the corny old word “Help.” I yelled it many times. Consistently negative results.

  The sky, so blue for the race-week, was clouding over: gray, like my thoughts.

  I had no idea what time it was. My fingers, exploring, discovered I had no watch.

  I could stand up.

  I stood.

  I could kneel down: didn’t bother.

&nbs
p; I could circle round the tree.

  I did that. The surrounding greenery was similar from all angles.

  The branches of the tree spread from just above my head, narrow hard arms ending in smaller offshoots and twigs. A good many tan-colored leaves still clung there. I tried shaking them off, but my efforts hardly wobbled them and they stubbornly remained.

  I sat down again and thought a good many further unwelcome thoughts, chief among them being that in the Liberty Market office I would never live this day down . . . if ever I lived to tell.

  Getting myself kidnapped . . . bloody stupid.

  Embarrassing to a degree.

  I thought back . . . If Pucinelli had been easier to reach I would have learned about the Goldoni family sooner, and I would have been long gone by the time the International Rug Co. Inc. arrived at the Sherryatt with their rug.

  If I hadn’t gone back upstairs to fetch my things . . .

  If, if, if.

  I thought of the face of Giuseppe-Peter-Pietro Goldoni coming through my bedroom door; intent, determined, a soldier in action, reminding me in his speed and neatness of Tony Vine. He had himself taken Dominic from the beach, and in a mask had been there personally to seize Alessia. It was possible to imagine that it had been he who had announced himself as the chauffeur to collect Morgan Freemantle; and if so the actual act of successful abduction could be almost as potent a satisfaction to him as the money it brought.

  If I understood him, I wondered, would I be better equipped? I’d never negotiated face to face with a kidnapper before: always through proxies. The art of coercive bargaining, Liberty Market training manual, chapter six. Hard to be coercive while at the present disadvantage.

  Time passed. Airliners flew at intervals overhead and a couple of birds came crossly to inspect the stranger in their territory. I sat, not uncomfortably, trying to shape my mind to the possibility of remaining where I was for some time.

  It began to rain.

  The tree gave little shelter, but I didn’t particularly mind. The drops spattered through the dying leaves in a soft shower, fresh and interesting on my skin. I’d never been out in the rain before with no clothes on, that I could remember. I lifted my face up, and opened my mouth, and drank what came my way.

  After a while the rain stopped, and it grew dark. All night, I thought coldly.

  Well. All night, then. Face it. Accept it. It’s not so hard.

  I was strong and healthy and possessed of a natural inborn stamina which had rarely been tested anywhere near its limits. The restriction to my arms was loose and not unbearable. I could sit there for a long time without suffering. I guessed, in fact, that I would have to.

  The greatest discomfort was cold, to which I tried to shut my mind, joined, as the night advanced, by a desire for a nice hot dinner.

  I tried on and off to rub the handcuffs vigorously against the tree trunk to see if the friction would do anything spectacularly useful like sawing the wood right through. The result of such labors was a slight roughening of the tree’s surface and a more considerable roughening of the skin inside my arms. Small the tree trunk might be, but densely, forbiddingly solid.

  I slept, on and off, dozing quite deeply and toppling sideways once, waking later with my nose on the dead leaves and my shoulders stretched and aching. I tried to find a more comfortable way of lying, but everything was compromise: sitting was the best.

  Waiting, shivering, for dawn, I began to wonder seriously for the first time whether he intended simply to leave me to the elements until I died.

  He hadn’t killed me in the hotel. The injection in my thigh which had put me unconscious could just as easily have been fatal, if death had been what he intended. A body in a rug could have been carried out of a hotel as boldly dead as unconscious. If he’d simply wanted me out of his life, why was I still in it?

  If he’d wanted revenge . . . that was something else.

  I’d told Kent Wagner confidently that Giuseppe-Peter wouldn’t kill by inches . . . and perhaps I’d been wrong.

  Well, I told myself astringently, you’ll just have to wait and see.

  Daylight came. A gray day, the clouds lower, scurrying, full of unhappy promise.

  Where’s the Verdi? I thought. I wouldn’t mind an orchestral earful. Verdi . . . Giuseppe Verdi.

  Oh, well. Giuseppe . . . It made sense.

  Peter was his own name—Pietro—in English.

  Coffee wouldn’t be bad, I thought. Ring room service to bring it.

  The first twenty-four hours were the worst for a kidnap victim: chapter one, Liberty Market training manual. From my own intimate viewpoint, I now doubted it.

  At what would have been full daylight except for the clouds, he came to see me.

  I didn’t hear him approach, but he was suddenly there, half behind me, stepping round one of the laurels; Giuseppe-Peter-Pietro Goldoni, dressed in his brown leather jacket with the gold buckles at the cuffs.

  I felt as if I had known him forever, yet he was totally alien. There was some quality of implacability in his approach, a sort of mute violence in the way he walked, a subtle arrogance in his carriage. His satisfaction at having brought me to this pass was plain to see, and the hairs rose involuntarily all up my spine.

  He stopped in front of me and looked down.

  “Your name is Andrew Douglas,” he said in English. His accent was pronounced, and like all Italians he had difficulty with the unfamiliar Scots syllables, but his meaning was clear.

  I looked back at him flatly and didn’t reply.

  Without excitement but with concentration he returned me look for look, and I began to sense in him the same feeling about me as I had about him. Professional curiosity, on both sides.

  “You will make a tape recording for me,” he said finally.

  “All right.”

  The ready agreement lifted his eyebrows: not what he’d expected.

  “You do not ask . . . who I am.”

  I said, “You’re the man who abducted me from the hotel.”

  “What is my name?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It is Peter.” A very positive assertion.

  “Peter.” I inclined my head, acknowledging the introduction. “Why am I here?”

  “To make a tape recording.”

  He looked at me somberly and went away, his head round and dark against the sky, all his features long familiar because of the picture. I’d nearly got him right, I thought. Maybe in the line of the eyebrows I’d been wrong: his were straighter at the outer edge.

  He was gone for a period I would have guessed at as an hour, and he returned with a brown traveling bag slung from one shoulder. The bag looked like fine leather, with gold buckles. All of a piece.

  From his jacket he produced a large sheet of paper which he unfolded and held for me to read.

  “This is what you will say,” he said.

  I read the message, which had been written in laborious block capitals by an American, not by Giuseppe-Peter himself.

  It said:I AM ANDREW DOUGLAS, UNDERCOVER COP. YOU IN THE FUCKING JOCKEY CLUB, LISTEN GOOD. YOU’VE GOT TO SEND THE TEN MILLION ENGLISH POUNDS, AS WAS SAID. THE CERTIFIED CHECK’S GOT TO BE READY TUESDAY. SEND IT TO ACCOUNT NUMBER ZL237/42806, CREDIT HELVETIA, ZURICH, SWITZERLAND. WHEN THE CHECK IS CLEARED, YOU GET FREEMANTLE BACK, NO FINGERS MISSING. THEN SIT TIGHT. IF THE COPS COME IN, I WON’T BE MAKING IT. IF EVERYTHING IS ON THE LEVEL AND THE BREAD IS SATISFACTORY, YOU’LL BE TOLD WHERE TO FIND ME. IF ANYONE TRIES TO BLOCK THE DEAL AFTER FREEMANTLE GOES LOOSE, I’LL BE KILLED.

  He tucked the paper inside the front of his jacket and began to pull a tape recorder from the leather bag.

  “I’m not reading that,” I said neutrally.

  He stopped in mid-movement. “You have no choice. If you do not read it, I will kill you.”

  I said nothing, simply looked at him without challenge; trying to show no worry.

  “I will kill you,” he said again: and
I thought yes, perhaps, but not for that.

  “It’s bad English,” I said. “You could have written it better yourself.”

  He let the tape recorder’s weight fall back into the bag. “Are you telling me,” he asked with incredulity, “that you are not reading this because of the style literary?”

  “Literary style,” I said. “Yes.”

  He turned his back on me while he thought, and after a while turned back.

  “I will change the words,” he said. “But you will read only what I say. Understand? No . . .” He searched for the words but said finally in Italian, “No code words. No secret signals.”

  I thought that if I kept him speaking English it might fractionally reduce my disadvantage, so I said, “What did you say? I don’t understand.”

  He narrowed his eyes slightly. “You speak Spanish. The maid at the hotel said you were a Spanish gentleman. I think you also speak Italian.”

  “Very little.”

  He pulled the paper from his jacket and found a pen, and, turning the sheet over, began to write a new version for me, supporting it on the bag. When he’d finished, he showed it to me, holding it so that I could read.

  In elegant handwriting the note now said:I am Andrew Douglas. Jockey Club, collect ten million English pounds. Tuesday, send certified banker’s draft to account number ZL237/42806, Credit Helvetia, Zurich, Switzerland. When the bank clears the draft, Morgan Freemantle returns. After that, wait. Police must not investigate. When all is peace, I will be free. If the money is not able to be taken out of the Swiss bank, I will be killed.

  “Well,” I said. “It’s much better.”

  He reached again for the tape recorder.

  “They won’t pay ten million,” I said.

  His hand paused again. “I know that.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you do.” I wished I could rub an itch on my nose. “In the normal course of events you would expect a letter to be sent to your Swiss account number from the Jockey Club, making a more realistic proposal.”

  He listened impassively, sorting the words into Italian, understanding. “Yes,” he said.

  “They might suggest paying a ransom of one hundred thousand pounds,” I said.