The phone rang in Lucia’s room. I went to answer it.
TJ, calling from Brooklyn. “At the laundromat,” he said. “What I do? Wait for some white dude to come in an’ use the phone?”
“That’s right. He should get there sooner or later. If you could park yourself at the restaurant across the street and keep an eye on the laundromat entrance—”
“Do better than that, man. I be right here in the laundromat, just another cat waitin’ on his clothes. Neighborhood here’s enough different colors so’s I don’t stick out too much. Kongs ever call you?”
“No. Did you reach them?”
“Beeped ’em and put your number in, but if Jimmy don’t have the beeper with him, it’s like it ain’t beepin’.”
“Like that tree in the forest.”
“Say what?”
“Never mind.”
“I be in touch,” he said.
WHEN the next call came in Yuri answered it, said, “Just a minute,” and passed it to me. The voice I heard was different this time, softer, more cultured. There was a nastiness in it but less of the obvious anger of the previous speaker.
“I understand we have a new player in the game,” he said. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
“I’m a friend of Mr. Landau’s. My name’s not important.”
“One likes to know who’s on the other side.”
“In a sense,” I said, “we’re on the same side, aren’t we? We both want the exchange to go through.”
“Then all you have to do is follow instructions.”
“No, it’s not that simple.”
“Of course it is. We tell you what to do and you do it. If you ever want to see the girl again.”
“You have to convince me that she’s alive.”
“You have my word on it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not good enough?”
“You lost a lot of credibility when you returned Mrs. Khoury in poor condition.”
There was a pause. Then, “How interesting. You don’t sound very Russian, you know. Nor do the tones of Brooklyn echo in your speech. There were special circumstances with Mrs. Khoury. Her husband tried to haggle, in the nature of his race. He sliced the price, and we in turn—well, you can finish that thought yourself, can’t you?”
And Pam Cassidy, I thought. What did she do that provoked you? But what I said was, “We won’t argue the price.”
“You’ll pay the million.”
“For the girl, alive and well.”
“I assure you she’s both.”
“And I still need more than your word. Put her on the phone, let her father talk to her.”
“I’m afraid that won’t—” he began, and the recorded voice of a NYNEX announcer cut in to ask for more money. “I’ll call you back,” he said.
“Out of quarters? Give me your number, I’ll call you.”
He laughed and broke the connection.
I WAS alone in the apartment with Yuri when the next call came. Kenan and Peter were out with one of the two guards from downstairs, looking to raise what cash they could. Yuri had given them a list of names and phone numbers, and they had some sources of their own. It would have been simpler if we could have made the calls from the penthouse, but we only had the two phone lines and I wanted to keep both of them open.
“You’re not in the business,” Yuri said. “You’re some kind of cop, yes?”
“Private.”
“Private, so you been working for Kenan. Now you’re working for me, right?”
“I’m just working. I’m not looking to be on the payroll, if that’s what you mean.”
He waved the issue aside. “This is a good business,” he said, “but also it’s no good. You know?”
“I think so.”
“I want to be out of it. That’s one reason I got no cash. I make lots of money, but I don’t want it in cash and I don’t want it in goods. I own parking lots, I own a restaurant, I spread it out, you know? In a little while I’m out of the dope business altogether. A lot of Americans start out as gangsters, yes? And wind up legitimate businessmen.”
“Sometimes.”
“Some are gangsters forever. But not all. Wasn’t for Devorah, I’d be out of it already.”
“Your wife?”
“The hospital bills, the doctors, my God, what it cost. No insurance. We were greenhorns, what did we know from Blue Cross? Doesn’t matter. Whatever it cost I paid. I was glad to pay it. I would have paid more to keep her alive, I would have paid anything. I would have sold the fillings out of my teeth if I could have bought her another day. I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and she had every day the doctors could give her, and what days they were, the poor woman, what she suffered through. But she wanted all the life she could get, you know?” He wiped a broad hand across his forehead. He was about to say something else but the phone rang. Wordless, he pointed at it.
I picked it up.
The same man said, “Shall we try again? I’m afraid the girl cannot come to the phone. That’s out of the question. How else can we reassure you of her well-being?”
I covered the mouthpiece. “Something your daughter would know.”
He shrugged. “The dog’s name?”
Into the phone I said, “Have her tell you—no, wait a minute.” I covered the phone and said, “They could know that. They’ve been shadowing her for a week or more, they know your schedule, they’ve undoubtedly seen her walking the dog, heard her call him by name. Think of something else.”
“We had a dog before this one,” he said. “A little black-and-white one, it got hit by a car. She was just a small thing herself when we had that dog.”
“But she would remember it?”
“Who could forget? She loved the dog.”
“The dog’s name,” I said into the phone, “and the name of the dog before this one. Have her describe both dogs and furnish their names.”
He was amused. “One dog won’t do. It has to be two.”
“Yes.”
“So that you may be doubly reassured. I’ll humor you, my friend.”
I WONDERED what he would do.
He’d have called from a pay phone. I was certain of that. He hadn’t stayed on the line long enough for his quarter to run out, but he wasn’t going to change the pattern now, not when it had worked so well for him. He was at a pay phone, and now he had to find out the name and description of two dogs, and then he would have to call me back.
Assume for the moment that he wasn’t calling from the laundromat phone. Assume he was at some phone on the street, far enough from his house that he’d taken a car. Now he would drive back to the house, park, go inside, and ask Lucia Landau the names of her dogs. And then he would drive around to still another phone and relay the information back to me.
Was that how I would do it?
Well, maybe. But maybe not. Maybe I’d spend a quarter and save a little time and running around, and call the house where my partner was guarding the girl. Let him take the gag out of her mouth for a minute and come back with the answers.
If only we had the Kongs.
Not for the first time, I thought how much easier it would be if Jimmy and David were set up in Lucia’s bedroom, with their modem plugged into her Snoopy phone and the computer set up on her dressing table. They could sit on Lucia’s phone and monitor her father’s, and whenever anyone called we’d have an instant trace.
If Ray called home to find out the names of the dogs, we’d be perching on that line, and before he knew what to call the dogs we’d know where they were keeping the girl. Before he had relayed the information to me we could have cars at both locations, to pick him up when he got off the phone and to lay siege to the house.
But I didn’t have the Kongs. All I had was TJ, sitting in a laundromat in Sunset Park and waiting for someone to use the phone. And if he hadn’t been profligate enough to squander half his funds on a beeper, I wouldn’t even
have that.
“Makes a person crazy,” Yuri said. “Sitting, staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring.”
And it was taking its time. Evidently Ray—that was how I was thinking of him, and I had come alarmingly close once already to calling him by name—evidently he had not called home, for whatever reason. Figure ten minutes to drive home, ten minutes to get the answers from the girl, ten minutes to get back to a phone and call us. Less if he hurried. More if he stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes, or if she was unconscious and they had to bring her around.
Say half an hour. Maybe more, maybe less, but say half an hour.
If she was dead it could take a little longer. Suppose she was. Suppose they’d killed her right off the bat, killed her before their first call to her father. That, certainly, was the simplest way to do it. No danger of escape. No concern about keeping her quiet.
And if she was dead?
They couldn’t admit it. Once they did there was no ransom. They were far from destitute, they’d taken four hundred thousand from Kenan less than a month ago, but that didn’t mean they didn’t want more. Money was something people always wanted more of, and if they hadn’t there would have been no first call, and probably no kidnapping. It was easy enough to pick a woman off the street at random if all you wanted was the thrill of it. You didn’t need to get cute.
So what would they do?
I figured they would probably try to brazen it out. Say she was out of it, say she’d been drugged and couldn’t focus enough to respond to questions. Or make up some name and insist that was what she’d told them.
We would know they were lying and would be about ninety percent certain Lucia was dead. But you believe what you want to believe, and we would want to believe in the slender possibility that she was alive, and that might lead us to pay the ransom anyway because if we didn’t pay there was no chance, no chance at all.
The phone rang. I snatched it up, and it was some jerk with a wrong number. I got rid of him and thirty seconds later he called back again. I asked him what number he was calling, and he had it right, but it turned out he was trying to call someone in Manhattan. I reminded him he had to dial the area code first. “Oh, God,” he said, “I’m always doing that. I’m so stupid.”
“I got calls like that this morning,” Yuri said. “Wrong numbers. A nuisance.”
I nodded. Had he called while I was getting rid of that idiot? If so, why didn’t he call back? The line was clear now. What the hell was he waiting for?
Maybe I had made a mistake, asking for proof. If she was dead all along I was only forcing it all out into the open. Instead of trying to bluff it through, he might decide to write the operation off and scramble for cover.
In which case I could wait forever for the phone to ring, because we wouldn’t be hearing from him again.
Yuri was right. It made a person crazy, sitting, staring at the phone. Waiting for it to ring.
ACTUALLY it took only twelve minutes over the thirty minutes I’d figured as an average. The phone rang and I grabbed it. I said hello, and Ray said, “I’d still like to know how you figure in this. You’d have to be a dealer. Are you a major trafficker?”
“You were going to answer some questions,” I reminded him.
“I wish you’d tell me your name,” he said. “I might recognize it.”
“I might recognize yours.”
He laughed. “Oh, I don’t think so. Why are you in such a rush, my friend? Are you afraid I’ll trace the call?”
In my mind I could hear him taunting Pam. “Pick one, Pam-mee. One’s for you and one’s for me, so which’ll it be, Pam-mee?”
I said, “It’s your quarter.”
“So it is. Ah, well. The dog’s name, eh? Let’s see, what are the old standbys? Fido, Towser, King. Rover, that’s always a popular favorite, isn’t it?”
I thought, shit, she’s dead.
“How about Spot? ‘Run, Spot, run!’ That’s not a bad name for a Rhodesian Ridgeback.”
But he would have known that much from the weeks of stalking her.
“The dog’s name is Watson.”
“Watson,” I said.
Across the room, the big dog shifted position, pricked up its ears. Yuri was nodding.
“And the other dog?”
“You want so much,” he said. “How many dogs do you need?”
I waited.
“She couldn’t tell me what breed the other dog was. She was young when it died. They had to put it to sleep, she said. Silly term for it, don’t you think? When you kill something you ought to have the courage to call it that. You’re not saying anything. Are you still there?”
“I’m still here.”
“I gather it was a mongrel. So many of us are. Now the name’s a bit of a problem. It’s a Russian word and I may not have it right. How’s your Russian, my friend?”
“A little rusty.”
“Rusty’s a good name for a dog. Maybe it was Rusty. You’re a tough audience, my friend. It’s hard to get a laugh out of you.”
“I’m a captive audience,” I said.
“Ah, would that it were so. We could have a very interesting conversation under those circumstances, you and I. Ah, well. Some other time, perhaps.”
“We’ll see.”
“Indeed we will. But you want the dog’s name, don’t you? The dog’s dead, my friend. What good is his name? Give a dog a dead name, give a dead dog a bad name—”
I waited.
“I may be saying this wrong. Balalaika.”
“Balalaika,” I said.
“It’s supposed to be the name of a musical instrument, or so she tells me. What do you say? Does it strike a chord?”
I looked at Yuri Landau. His nod was unequivocal. On the phone, Ray was saying something or other but the words weren’t getting through to me. I felt light-headed, and had to lean against the kitchen counter or I might have fallen.
The girl was alive.
Chapter 19
As soon as I got off the phone with Ray, Yuri fell on me and wrapped me up in a bear hug. “Balalaika,” he said, invoking the name as if it were a magic spell. “She’s alive, my Luschka is alive!”
I was still in his embrace when the door opened and the Khourys came in, trailed by Landau’s man Dani. Kenan was carrying an old-fashioned leather satchel with a zipper top, Peter a white plastic shopping bag from Kroger’s. “She’s alive,” Yuri told them.
“You spoke with her?”
He shook his head. “They told me the dog’s name. She remembered Balalaika. She’s alive.”
I don’t know how much sense this made to the Khourys, who had been out on a fund-raising mission when the recognition signals were arranged, but they got the gist of it.
“Now all you need is a million dollars,” Kenan told him.
“Money you can always get.”
“You’re right,” Kenan said. “People don’t realize that but it’s absolutely true.” He opened the leather satchel and began taking out stacks of wrapped bills, arranging them in rows on top of the mahogany table. “You got some good friends, Yuri. Good thing, too, is most of ’em don’t believe in banks. People don’t realize how much of the country’s economy runs on cash. You hear cash, you think drugs, you think gambling.”
“Tip of the iceberg,” Peter said.
“You got it. Don’t just think of the rackets. Think dry cleaners, think barbershops, beauty parlors. Any place that handles a lot of cash, so they can keep an extra set of books and skim half the take out from under the IRS.”
“Think coffee shops,” Peter said. “Yuri, you shoulda been a Greek.”
“A Greek? Why should I be a Greek?”
“Every corner there’s a coffee shop, right? Man, I worked for one of them. Ten employees on my shift, six of us were off the books, paid in cash. Why? Because they got all this cash they’re not declaring, got to keep the expenses in proportion. If they report thirty cents of every dollar goes through the register,
that’s a lot. And you know the frosting on the cake? Eight and a quarter percent sales tax on every sale, law says they have to collect it. But the seventy percent of sales they don’t report, they can’t exactly hand over the tax on that, can they? So it gets skimmed, too. Pure tax-free profit, every penny of it.”
“Not just Greeks,” Yuri said.
“No, but they got it down to a science. You were Greek, all you gotta do is hit twenty coffee shops. You don’t think they all got fifty grand in the safe, or stuffed in the mattress, or under a loose board in the clothes closet? Hit twenty and you got your million.”
“But I am not a Greek,” Yuri said.
Kenan asked him if he knew any diamond merchants. “They have a lot of cash,” he said. Peter said a lot of the jewelry business was markers, IOUs that passed back and forth. Kenan said there was still some cash in it somewhere, and Yuri said it didn’t matter because he didn’t know anyone in diamonds.
I went into the other room and left them at it.
I WANTED to call TJ and I got out the piece of paper with all the calls the Kongs had logged to Kenan’s phone. I found the number of the laundromat pay phone but hesitated. Would TJ know to answer it? And would it compromise him if the place was crowded? And suppose Ray picked up the phone? That seemed unlikely, but—
Then I remembered there was a simpler way. I could beep him and let him call me. I seemed to be having trouble adjusting to this new technology. I still automatically thought in more primitive terms.
I found his beeper number in my notebook, but before I could dial it the phone rang, and it was TJ.
“Man was just here,” he said. He sounded excited. “Just on this phone.”
“It must have been someone else.”
“No chance, Vance. Mean dude, you look at him an’ you know you seein’ evil. Wasn’t you just talkin’ to him? I got this flash, said my man Matt is talkin’ to this dude.”