“Harry,” the news president said, “I know the way you work, and that you get a ‘feel’ for situations quickly. Has that happened with this story?”
“I think so, yes.” Partridge glanced toward Teddy Cooper. “Teddy believes our birds have flown the country; I’ve come to that conclusion too. But something else I have an instinct about is that we’re close to a breakthrough—either through our doing or it will happen. Then we’ll know about the kidnappers: who and where.”
“And when we do?”
“When it happens,” Partridge said. “I’ll be on my way. Wherever the break leads, I want to be there fast and first.”
“You shall be,” Chippingham said. “And I promise you’ll get all the support you need.”
Partridge laughed and looked around the table. “Remember that, everybody. You all heard.”
“We sure did,” Jaeger said. “Les, if we have to, we’ll remind you of those words.”
Chippingham shook his head. “That won’t be needed.”
The talk continued. While it did, Rita appeared to be searching in her bag, though what she was doing was scribbling on a piece of paper. Discreetly, under the table, she put it into Chippingham’s hands.
He waited until attention was directed away from him, then looked down. The note read: Les, feel like getting laid? Let’s get out of here.
15
They went to Rita’s. Her apartment was on West Seventy-second, only a short taxi ride from Sfuzzi’s. Chippingham was living farther uptown in the Eighties while his and Stasia’s divorce was being fought over, but the apartment was small, cheap for New York, and he wasn’t proud of it. He missed the plush Sutton Place co-op he and Stasia had shared for a decade before their breakup. The co-op was forbidden territory to him now, a lost utopia. Stasia’s lawyers had seen to that.
Anyway, right now he and Rita wanted the nearest private place. Their hands were busy in the taxi until he told her, “If you keep doing that, I’ll explode like Vesuvius and it may be months before the volcano’s in business again.”
She laughed and said, “Not you!” but desisted just the same.
On the way, Chippingham had the cab driver stop at a newsstand. He left the taxi and returned burdened with the early Sunday editions of the New York Times, Daily News, and Post.
“At least I know where I rate in your priorities,” Rita observed. “I only hope you’re not planning to read those before …”
“Later,” he assured her. “Much, much later.”
Even as he spoke, Chippingham wondered if he would ever grow up where women were concerned. Probably not, or at least not until his libido burned lower. Some men, he knew, would envy his virility which, with his fiftieth birthday only a few months away, was almost as good as when he was half that age. On the other hand, a permanent horniness had its penalties.
While Rita excited him now, as she had on earlier occasions, and he knew there was pleasure ahead for them both, he knew also that in an hour or two he would ask himself: Was it worth all the trouble? Along the same lines, he often wondered: Had his sexual dalliances been worth losing a wife he genuinely cared about and, at the same time, putting his entire career in jeopardy—the last a reality made clear by Margot Lloyd-Mason during their recent meeting at Stonehenge?
Why did he do it? In part, because he could never resist a carnal romp when opportunity arose and, in the news business, such openings were legion. Then there was the thrill of the chase, which never lessened, and finally the invasion and physical fulfillment—getting and giving, both equally important.
Les Chippingham kept a notebook, carefully hidden, recording his sexual conquests—a list of names in a special code that only he could decipher. All the names were women he had liked and some who, for a while, he truly loved.
Rita’s name, recently added to his book, was the one hundred and twenty-seventh entry. Chippingham tried not to think of the list as a scorecard, though in a way it was.
Some people who led quieter or more innocent lives might find that figure excessive, perhaps difficult to believe. But those employed in television or working in any other creative field—artists, actors, writers—would have no trouble believing it at all.
He doubted if Stasia had any idea of the number of his side excursions—which brought to mind another recurring question: Was there any way to repair their marriage, a chance of returning to the closeness he and Stasia had enjoyed even while she knew of his philandering? He wished the answer could be yes, but knew it was too late. Stasia’s bitterness and hurt were overwhelming now. A few weeks ago he had tried writing her a letter with a tentative approach. Stasia’s lawyer had replied, warning Chippingham not to communicate directly with his client again.
Well, he reflected, even if that particular ball game was lost, nothing would hinder the pleasure of the next hour or two with Rita.
Rita, too, had been considering relationships, though on a simpler level. She had never married, never having met an available man to whom she wanted to tie herself permanently. As to her current affair with Les, she knew there was no long-term future. Having known and watched him for a long time, she believed Les incapable of fidelity. He moved from one woman to the next with the casualness that other men changed underwear. What he did have, though, was that big, long body with accessories to match, so that a sexual escapade with him was a euphoric, joyous, heavenly dream. As they arrived at her apartment building and Les paid off the taxi, she was dreaming of it now.
Rita shut and bolted her apartment door and a moment later they were kissing. Then, wasting no more time, she led the way to her bedroom as Les followed, dropping his jacket, tossing his tie aside, unbuttoning his shirt.
The bedroom was typical Rita—organized, yet in a casual, comfortable way with pastel-colored chintzes, and cushions everywhere. Deftly, she pulled back and roughly folded the bedspread, throwing it onto a nearby armchair. She undressed quickly, flinging her clothes in all directions, an instinctive lover’s gesture of shedding inhibitions too. As each garment flew she smiled across at Les. He in turn appraised her as he slipped out of his undershorts, sending them sailing after Rita’s panties and brassiere.
As he had before, he liked what he saw.
Rita, a natural brunette, began dying her hair in her early thirties when a few gray strands appeared. But after changing her job and image from correspondent to producer, she let nature have its way and now her hair was an attractive mixture of dark brown and silver. Her figure, too, had matured and she carried an extra ten pounds over an earlier sleek hundred and twenty. “You could say,” she told Les on the first occasion he had viewed her nude, “that I went from Aphrodite to a comfortable Venus.”
“I’ll take your Venus,” he had said.
Either way, Rita’s five-foot-six body was in excellent shape, the hips well rounded, breasts high and firm.
As her eyes dropped, she knew Les needed no further arousal. Yet he came to her slowly, bending down to kiss her forehead, her eyelids and her mouth. Then, gently cupping his hands around her breasts, he drew the nipples, each in turn, into his mouth. A quiver of bliss ran through her as she felt them harden.
Breathing deeply, each movement of her body a growing delight, Rita’s hands reached down to Les’s groin, moving her fingers gently, slowly, her touch feather-light, experienced. She felt his whole body stiffen, heard the sharp intake of his breath and a soft low sigh of pleasure.
Gently, Chippingham pushed her down on the bed, his hands and tongue continuing to explore the sweet, warm wetness of her body. When neither could wait any longer, he slid inside her. Rita cried out, then moments later soared to a final, glorious peak.
Rita floated for a while, savoring the lazy moments until her ever-active mind posed questions. Each time, their love-making was so smooth, so perfect, so experienced, that she wondered: Was it always like this for the women who had sex with Les? She supposed it must be. He had a way of handling a woman’s body that had given Rita—and p
robably all the others—an undiluted ecstasy. And Rita’s own excitement undoubtedly enhanced his own. Only after her exquisite climax—and how wonderful not to have to fake or strain toward it!—did he, too, explode within her.
Later, bodies damp, sweat mingling in its own sweet union, they lay side by side breathing deeply, evenly.
“Leslie Chippingham,” Rita said, “has anyone told you you’re the world’s most perfect lover?”
He laughed, then kissed her. “Loving is poetry. Poetry feeds on inspiration. At this moment, you are mine.”
“You’re good with words, too,” she told him. “Maybe you should be in the news business.”
After a while they slept, then, awakening, made love again.
Eventually, inevitably, Chippingham and Rita turned from sex to the pile of Sunday papers which Les had stopped to buy. They spread them on the bed and he started with the Times, Rita the Post.
Both devoured the latest developments from the Sloane family kidnap, emphasis being on Saturday morning’s explosion at White Plains in the vehicle the kidnappers had used, and the resulting devastation. From a professional viewpoint, Rita was pleased to see that CBA News had missed nothing major in its Saturday evening coverage. While the print press had longer stories with more reactions, the essentials were the same.
From the kidnap, Rita and Les moved on to major national and international stories to which they had paid less than usual attention in the past few days. Neither spent any time reading, and scarcely noticed, a single-column report appearing only in the Post and buried on an inside page.
UN DIPLOMAT
SLAYS LOVER, SELF
IN JEALOUS RAGE
A United Nations diplomat, José Antonio Salaverry, and his woman friend, Helga Efferen, were found shot dead Saturday in Salaverry’s 48th St. apartment. Police describe the shootings as “a jealous lover’s murder-suicide.”
Salaverry was a member of the Peruvian delegation to the UN. Efferen, an American citizen, formerly a Lebanese immigrant, was employed by the American-Amazonas Bank at its Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza branch.
The bodies of the dead couple were discovered early Saturday by a janitor. A medical examiner fixed the time of death between 8 and 11 P.M. the previous day. Substantial evidence, police say, points to the discovery by Salaverry that Efferen was using his apartment as a base for her sexual affairs with other men. Enraged, he shot her, then himself.
16
With the grace of a gull the Learjet 55LR descended through the night, its powerful engines momentarily curbed. It settled toward two parallel strands of lights ahead, marking runway one-eight of Opa Locka Airport. Beyond the airport were the myriad lights of Greater Miami, their reflection a vast halo in the sky.
From his seat in the passenger cabin Miguel peered through a window, hoping that America’s lights and all they represented would be behind him soon.
He checked his watch. 11:18 P.M. The flight from Teterboro had taken slightly more than two and a quarter hours.
Rafael, in the seat ahead, was watching the approaching lights. Socorro, beside him, appeared to be dozing.
Miguel turned his head toward Baudelio who, a few feet away, was continuing to monitor the three caskets, using the external equipment he had fastened to them. Baudelio nodded, indicating all was well, and Miguel turned his mind to another potential problem which had just arisen.
A few minutes earlier he had gone forward to the flight deck and asked, “At Opa Locka, how quickly can you do what’s needed and get us on our way?”
“Shouldn’t take more than half an hour,” the pilot, Underhill, had said. “All we have to do is refuel and file a flight plan.” He hesitated, then added, “Though if Customs decide to take a look at us, it could be longer.”
Miguel said sharply, “We don’t have to clear Customs here.”
The pilot nodded. “Normally true; they don’t bother with outgoing flights. Lately, though, I’ve heard they’ve been making occasional checks, sometimes at night.” Though attempting to sound casual, his voice betrayed concern.
Miguel was jolted by the information. His own and the Medellín cartel’s intelligence about the rules and habits of U.S. Customs was the reason Opa Locka had been chosen as the airport of departure.
Like Teterboro, Florida’s Opa Locka was used by private aircraft only. Because of incoming flights from overseas, it had a U.S. Customs office—a small, makeshift affair housed in a trailer, with a correspondingly small staff. Compared with Customs departments at important international airports like Miami, New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, Opa Locka was a poor relation, obliged to use less exacting procedures than elsewhere. Usually no more than two Customs officers were on duty, and even then only from 11 A.M. to 7 P.M. on weekdays and 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Sundays. The present Learjet journey had been scheduled on the assumption that by this late hour Customs would be closed, the staff long gone.
Underhill added, “If anyone’s in Customs and their airport radio is on, they’ll hear us talking with the tower. After that, they may be interested in us, maybe not.”
Miguel realized there was nothing he could do except go back to his seat and wait. When he was there he mentally ran over possibilities.
If they did encounter U.S. Customs tonight, unlikely as it seemed, the cover story was in place and they could use it. Socorro, Rafael and Baudelio would play their parts, Miguel his. Baudelio could quickly disconnect his controls connected to the caskets. No, the problem was not with the cover story and all that supported it, but with the rules a Customs inspector was supposed to follow when a dead body left the country.
Miguel had studied the official regulations and knew them by heart. Specific papers were required for each body—a death certificate, a permit of disposition from a county health department, an entry permit from the country of destination. The dead person’s passport was not needed, but—most critically—a casket must be opened, its contents inspected by a Customs officer, then the casket sealed.
With careful foresight Miguel had obtained all the needed documents; they were forgeries, but good ones. Supplementary were the gory traffic accident photographs, unidentified but fitting the general story, also the bogus press clippings, the latter stating that the bodies were so badly burned and mangled as to be unrecognizable.
So if a Customs man was on duty at Opa Locka and came their way, all papers were in order, but would he insist on looking into the caskets? Equally to the point, having read the descriptions, would he want to?
Once more Miguel felt himself tense as the Learjet landed smoothly and taxied in to Hangar One.
Customs Inspector Wally Amsler figured that some gameplan-happy bureaucrat in Washington must have dreamed up Operation Egress. Whoever it was, he (or maybe she) was probably in bed and asleep by now, which was where Wally would prefer to be instead of wandering around this godforsaken Opa Locka Airport, which was off the beaten track in daytime and lonely as hell at night. It was half an hour before midnight and there were two more hours after that before he and the other two Customs guys on special duty here could put Egress behind them and go home.
The grouchiness was unusual for Amsler who was basically cheerful and friendly, except to those who broke the laws he upheld. Then he could be cool and tough, his sense of duty inflexible. Mostly he liked his work, though he had never cared for night duty and avoided it whenever possible. But a week ago he had had a bout with flu and still didn’t feel good; earlier tonight he had considered calling in sick, though he decided not to. And something else had been distressing him lately—his status in the Customs Service.
Despite doing his job conscientiously for more than twenty years, he hadn’t advanced to where he believed he should have been by his present age, a few months short of fifty. His status was Inspector, GS-9, which was really a journeyman grade, no more. There were plenty of others younger than himself and with far less experience who were already Senior Inspectors, GS-11. Amsler took orders from them.
He had always assumed that someday he would move up to Senior Inspector but now, being realistic, he knew his chances were remote. Was that fair? He wasn’t sure. His record was good and he had always put duty to the Service above other considerations, including some personal ones. At the same time, he had never pushed hard to become a leader and nothing he had done in line of duty was spectacular; perhaps that had been the problem. Of course, even as a GS-9, the pay wasn’t bad. With overtime, working a six-day week, he earned about $50,000 a year and there would be a good pension in another fifteen years.
But pay and pension weren’t, by themselves, enough. He needed to activate his life, to do something by which, even in a modest way, he would be remembered. He wished it would happen and he felt he deserved it. But at Opa Locka, late at night and working Operation Egress, it wasn’t likely to.
Egress was a program involving the random inspection of aircraft about to depart the United States for other countries. There was no way all of them could be checked; Customs didn’t have the staff. So a blitz-type operation was used in which a team of inspectors descended on an airport unannounced and for the next several hours boarded foreign-destined flights—mostly private planes. The program was often in effect at night.
Officially the objective was to search for high-tech equipment being exported illegally. Unofficially, Customs was also looking for currency in excess of authorized amounts, particularly large sums of drug money. The latter motive had to be unofficial because legally, under the Fourth Amendment, there could be no search for money without “probable cause.” However, if a lot of money was discovered during another type of search, Customs had the right to deal with it.
Sometimes Egress produced results—occasionally sensational. But nothing of that kind had happened when Amsler was around, a reason he wasn’t enthusiastic about the program. Just the same, Egress was why he and two other inspectors were at Opa Locka tonight, though outbound foreign flights had been fewer than usual and it seemed unlikely there would be many more.