“How does he want it?” I said finally.
“He didn’t say what denominations, Sam.” Taylor sounded irritated, as though he would fire the man for inefficiency if he knew who he was. “He said to put the money in a five-by-twelve-inch manila envelope.”
“What?”
He repeated the instructions and I asked, a little stiffly, “Well, Henry, are you gonna?” He was sounding as though maybe the whole thing should be handled by his secretary. I’m not too fond of Mr. Henry Taylor, with whom I’d done business before.
“Of course I am,” he said indignantly, and again we breathed into each other’s ear.
“Tell me what he said,” I said. “All of it.”
“He said he had Bella and would do unspeakable things to her if I didn’t pay him twenty thousand dollars.”
“Are you quoting exactly? Did he actually say ‘unspeakable things’?”
“Yes, he did.”
“What kind of voice — the rhythm, the tone? Cultured? Educated?”
“I would say educated. But muffled, as if spoken through a handkerchief. Sam, will you help me?”
“What else did he say?”
“To be in the lobby of the Bancroft Building with the money sealed in the envelope and stand in front of the third telephone booth from the end at exactly one-thirty this afternoon.”
“You personally?”
“Yes, damn it — me.”
“I suppose you’ve got a board meeting,” I said snottily, “that’ll interfere.”
“You can damn well believe, Train, that I’ve got better things to do with my time than this!” He’d almost snarled it and I grinned into the mirror over my telephone table. Taylor was a self-made tycoon (like most of them — I mean, who else would make one?) in the import-export business and had more than his share of arrogance.
“When did you see her last?” I said more civilly.
“This morning, at home. She left the house around seven-thirty. I was eating breakfast.”
“Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?”
More heavy breathing in my ear — then, aggressively: “No. I didn’t ask.”
“How was she dressed?”
“I—”
“You didn’t notice. O.K., Henry, few husbands do. But it would be nice to know where she was headed, wouldn’t it? I mean like for a swim, or what?”
“You’ll help me with this, Sam?”
“What would you like me to do — lend you the money? O.K., I’m kidding, but can you raise it that fast?” It became an honest question before I got it all out; I’d damn near had to sue him once to collect a modest fee.
“Of course I can,” he said.
“Could you raise — say, fifty — that fast?”
“Possibly not. Why? All he wants—”
“I was just wondering,” I said. “What else did our man say?”
“The usual stuff. Don’t call the cops, nothing but unmarked bills, etcetera.”
I paused, listening to the echo of the easy, casual voice, and thinking sardonically, How quickly we adapt — to anything. Kidnapping was nearly epidemic on a global scale, spreading like some new game of chance, and everybody was in on its special language and rules. The “usual stuff.” He should have been raging mad — and scared.
But I let all that pass. I’m a professional, I keep telling myself, with no values but those the client demands. The eyes in the mirror looked shifty. “What line did he call you on,” I asked, “your private one, or the company’s?”
“My private. Bella probably gave it to him.”
“Did you ask?”
“No.”
“O.K.” I had a mental picture of the lobby of the Bancroft Building with its dozen or so phone booths toward the rear just past the double bank of elevators. “At one-thirty I’ll be in the fourth booth from the end. After you take your call I’ll bump into you as you leave the booth and you drop something — the envelope, maybe. While we’re fumbling around with that, smiling amiably all the while, tell me what he said. O.K.?”
He was dubious. “Shouldn’t we meet beforehand somewhere?”
“No. If you’re being watched, you’re being watched starting now. You concentrate on getting the money — and the right size envelope. I suspect that’s important. I’ll see you at one-thirty.”
I hung up and the face in the mirror wasn’t smiling now. There had been two other kidnappings in the San Francisco area in the last fifteen days, both pure extortion, both similar to this in all respects but the amount demanded. It’s another way the poor have found to bedevil the rich, and it works more often than not.
I got up, went into my kitchen, and poured a cup of lukewarm coffee from the morning’s pot. I would have to change clothes. I was dressed for tennis and would have been playing right now except that my partner had phoned a little earlier and cancelled out. He’d slipped getting out of bed and sprained his wrist — or so he said. Outside my window it was a bushy-tailed, blue-eyed day under a crackling sun. A dangerous day. A day for Murphy’s law to prevail, a day for mirrors to crack at an angel’s glance. More unprofessional ruminations — but any day Taylor replaces tennis has got to be bad. Besides, I was remembering the trouble I’d had collecting from him before. Like most of the rich, he figures it should all flow in and none out. That’s how they get that way.
The Bancroft Building is about a twenty-minute walk from my apartment on Van Ness, and I was there at one-fifteen. I bought a paper from the newsstand at the front of the lobby and glanced around, but saw nothing unusual. A man was in the fourth phone booth from the end and when he left I replaced him. The third booth was empty and stayed that way until Taylor arrived at two or three minutes before the half hour and stepped into it, glaring at me through the glass. At exactly one-thirty I heard the phone ring in his booth and I watched him raise it to his ear, listen, frown, and then hang up.
I almost knocked him off his feet when we collided a few seconds later outside the booths, and he wasn’t smiling amiably as he stooped to retrieve the bulky envelope he’d dropped. He’d lost his usual cool arrogance. Maybe the reality had finally penetrated — some bad guys had got hold of his wife.
“He wants me to go immediately to a phone booth on the thirty-eighth floor of this building,” he said gutturally, “and do what it says on the top of page three hundred and eighty of the phone book in that booth.” He straightened up. “Come with me, Sam.”
“No. And smile, damn it!” The thing was beginning to become vaguely clear to me, like the sound of a distant band approaching. “Go do it!”
I walked back toward the newsstand up front and stopped there, looking back as Taylor disappeared aboard an elevator. Then the music got louder in my head and I walked briskly, nearly running, to the big bronze mailbox implanted on the wall between two elevators and looked at the collection schedule on the front. The next pickup was at 1:40. It was now 1:37. Two letters flashed down the glass chute into the box as I stood there before moving away again, back toward the newsstand.
Taylor must be on the thirty-eighth floor by now, reading the instructions in the phone book, which would tell him to drop the fat envelope down the mail chute on the wall, and then a minute or two later, a mailman — fake, I was telling myself — would pick it up and take it away. The music was blaring now in my head as loudly as a passing parade.
I saw the guy in the mailman’s uniform come in from the alley behind the building, pass the line of phone booths, and angle across the lobby to the big bronze box. He was small and skinny and seemed nervous, his uniform ill-fitting, too wide in the shoulders.