Chapter 5
Had the designers of Heathrow Airport given sufficient thought to the possible use of their premises for the purposes of kidnaping, it is probable they would have been a bit more generous in directing both incoming victim and potential sequesterer to the same exit to make contact. As it was, the customs area discharged arriving passengers into a vast arena filled with screaming relatives, small children entangled in luggage carts, porters taking the incorrect baggage of the wrong parties to erroneous taxi-ranks, and with an overabundance of access openings. Harold Nishbagel, cruising slowly past the multiple doorways of the vast building, with constant streams of impatient humanity fighting their way past each other, was beginning to feel the first touches of panic as he realized the excellent possibility of missing his party. While not a person of outstanding imagination, Harold was still capable of easily picturing Clarence’s reaction should he fail to appear at the farm with the fat man in attendance. It was not a scene he cared to dwell upon.
He was about to tread heavily on the accelerator and attempt to speed around the building for another pass at the seemingly endless crowded exits, when he saw to his vast relief a mustard-colored balloon-sized figure emerge from a doorway not too distant, taking with it in the process several small bodies intent upon entering, and make its way to the stop for city-bound buses. Without any overwhelming regard for intervening traffic, Harold aimed at the curb and sped for it, arriving just as the white-haired, blue-eyed gentleman was straightening up from setting down his single bag. Harold leaned over, swinging open the door on the passenger side of the car, then opening his own door and climbing down. The wildly honking horns occasioned by his rather abrupt passage across the busy thoroughfare prevented him from being heard at first, but once the exigencies of vehicular movement cleared the disgruntled motorists from the scene, he came through loud and clear.
“Hey! You there! You — fat man!” he called out, not wishing to be misunderstood. His brilliant plastic smile robbed the unconventional greeting of any offense. “I’m supposed to be pickin’ you up. Hop in.”
He opened the car’s trunk and tossed Carruthers’ bag inside, while Billy-Boy stared, surprised. A large hand next propelled the rotund, mustard-colored man around the car and managed to wedge him into the front seat before he could quite recover himself. When he did so he found his massive driver had squeezed himself into the other side of the small vehicle and was releasing the hand brake preparatory to launching them once again into the traffic pattern, if pattern properly describes the anarchy that appeared to prevail in the road.
From another exit, Sir Percival Pugh watched and frowned. The reason for the separation of the three friends had now become clear. Someone, undoubtedly unaware of the financial disaster that had overtaken the three old men, and probably relying solely on the information gained from that Sunday supplement in color, had come to the conclusion that kidnaping one of the three old men, in this case Carruthers, would be an easy road to riches.
Well, on their own heads be it, Sir Percival thought uncharitably of the kidnapers; whoever they are they’ll be sadder and wiser men before they’re through. And he raised his hand for a taxi.
In the small car, Carruthers was frowning at the driver.
“I beg your pardon,” he said politely, “but I do believe you’ve made a mistake. Normal enough, of course. I realize I probably look like every other old, fat man with blue eyes and white hair, wearing a mustard-colored suit, but I’m afraid it’s a mistake none the less. You see, I wasn’t expecting to be picked up.”
“No mistake, pops,” Harold said cheerfully, and cut between a lorry loaded with concrete building blocks and a bus filled with Welsh footballers, all singing at the tops of their voices. From the little glimpse Harold had of them through the open windows of the bus, he could scarcely credit their vocal efforts; when he had played right tackle for Sing Sing, nobody sang after the mauling it appeared the bus passengers had taken. Crazy! Harold thought, and shook his head. England! He shrugged and brought his attention back to his passenger. “No mistake at all, pops,” he said. “You’re William Carruthers, ain’t you?” He did not give Carruthers a chance to deny it. “I seen your picture in the paper.”
“That’s quite correct,” Billy-Boy said, mystified by the affair. “Now, to complete this informative exchange of relative trivia, just who are you?”
“Me? My name’s Harold Nishbagel, but you can call me Hal. Most people call me Hal,” he added darkly, “on account of I tell them to. I like it better than Harold.” He started to extend a hamlike hand across the car toward Carruthers to be shaken, but thought better of it as a tow truck dragging a crippled charabanc almost collided with them; with more luck than skill Harold swung the wheel and managed to avoid disaster. In Chicago, when he had lived and worked there, he had been trusted with many demanding tasks, but driving the getaway car had never been one of them.
Carruthers swallowed. “I say,” he said tentatively, watching the scenery swirl about him as Harold straightened the wheels, “you haven’t driven much in England, have you?”
“A guy would have to be crazy,” Harold said fervently, and narrowly missed a double-decker whose driver was apparently more interested in the décolletage of a female passenger seen through his rear-view mirror than he was in the traffic. “They drive backward!”
“And you are an American.” It was a statement, not a question.
Harold beamed. He hadn’t known it showed. “Yeah!”
“Well,” Carruthers said, wriggling in the tight seat in a vain effort to find a more comfortable position, “now that these niggling but undoubtedly vital facts are out of the way, could I inquire as to who requested you to pick me up? And precisely why? And, of course, to complete the catechism, the ultimate destination of our little outing as well as the estimated time of arrival?”
A single question was Harold’s absolute limit; three or four at a time were far beyond his ability to cope. Billy-Boy saw the wrinkles beginning to form on Harold’s brow, like hairline cracks forecasting the collapse of a concrete dam. He properly interpreted them and took pity on his large companion.
“Let’s take them one at a time,” he said gently, removing his gaze, not reluctantly, from the roadway unfolding before them, and turning instead to consider his driver. “First of all, to be succinct, what is this all about?”
Harold, at least, knew the answer to that one. “Television,” he said promptly.
“Ah? We’re on television?” Carruthers looked around; as he had suspected, they were not.
“Naw. They’re goin’ to interview you.”
“Ah!” It didn’t make much more sense, but at least it was intelligible and at this point every little bit helped. “And just who is going to so honor me?”
“All I know is television,” Harold said, not about to be caught out so easily.
“Sorry,” Carruthers said contritely. “Let us go on. I shall attempt another tack. Why are these so-discerning folks going to interview just me? What about my two friends?”
Harold knew the answer to this question, as well. He felt sure that Clarence would have been proud of the manner in which he was acquitting himself.
“Your friends are goin’ to meet you later,” he said in his gravel voice, and tried to remember what else Clarence had said. “Oh! Yeah. At your club. Somethin’ about writin’.”
It had long since occurred to Billy-Boy Carruthers that there was something odd, to say the very least, about the entire affair. While he knew relatively little about the operation of television studios, he was sure they were sufficiently sound financially to be able to afford better transportation for potential interviewees than the small, uncomfortable car in which he found himself. He also seemed to recall a recent article in the Times regarding the difficulty of foreigners obtaining work permits with the high unemployment, and it appeared doubtful to him that the hulk beside him could pass the liberal reading and spelling requirements, let alone the driving test. Nor did he think for a moment — as Timothy Briggs might have done — that they were merely in a segment of “Candid Camera”; for one thing the car was too small for people, let alone auxiliary photographic equipment, and if they were being filmed from another car it would have to be with telescopic sights, for by this time they were far from the airport and practically alone on the road.