“I got a truck-leasing lot on Northern Boulevard and twenty percent of a cable TV outfit in Trenton, okay? I got a piece of a resort hotel down in the Bahamas. I got nursing homes in Staten Island I built and I own, you know that?”
He was sitting on the bed, elbows on knees; his hands dangled from the wrists. He wasn’t looking at her.
“I got half of a little private hospital out in Amityville. What this leads up to, Madeleine, the point I’m trying to make, you’ve been acting very strange all of a sudden here and I think maybe you’re having a little nervous breakdown or something, and if you were to go and see some lawyer or try to steal my daughter out of her home or anything like that, then I guess I wouldn’t have any choice but to have you committed to a mental facility for observation and treatment. For however long it might take to straighten out your head.”
Then he looked up and smiled.
It was a warm smile full of bright pleased triumph: it was the most frightening expression she’d ever seen on a human face.
After that it was a question of opportunity and even more of courage.
Neither came easily. She realized belatedly how stupid it had been to forewarn him. Now the baby was always under supervision: there were nurses and nannies around the clock. No one prevented the mother from being with the baby; no one limited the mother’s freedom of movement—so long as the baby remained in view of employees—but the unspoken rules were manifest. She never doubted Bert had meant every word he’d said, quite specifically and literally. He was entirely capable of putting her away in a rubber room somewhere and locking it for the rest of her life.
He would grieve, of course. He would be mortally offended. He would be the suffering injured party, filled with pain. As the little girl grew up he would explain to her how her mother had gone mad and tried to break up the family and actually tried to kidnap poor baby Ellen from her loving daddy.…
She moved into the guest bedroom of the condominium. Bert allowed that much. He had enough dignity not to wish to share a bed with a woman who reacted catatonically to his advances; and he had enough concern for appearances to keep his liaisons discreet.
Evidently he convinced himself she was making her way through the confusions of some temporary emotional aberration. Every second or third day they’d cross paths or he’d seek her out; on those occasions he would say, “Come back when you’re ready,” and “Maybe you ought to talk to a shrink, what do you think? Might help you straighten yourself out,” and “Must be kind of lonely in that guest bedroom,” and “I’m not putting any pressure on. You let me know now, hey?” He had cast himself as the innocent, waiting for her to recognize her error—waiting her out with humble seraphic patience.
She was free to come and go. With acquaintances like Diane and with the few friends she had left from modeling days she kept up appearances because she didn’t know what else she could do; but regardless of outward appearances of unrestricted freedom she was imprisoned—tethered to a chain leash that Bert might yank at any time.
Of course it was intolerable. You could go mad this way in no time at all. Soon if they put her in a mental home it wouldn’t be a fiction.
The decision to escape was anticlimactic, really. There were only questions of when and how. She had to find, or design, a way to abduct the baby and to disappear so neatly that Bert could neither follow nor find her.
That was when she went to Newark and pumped Ray Seale about the mechanics of skip-tracing and disappearance.
After that she set out methodically to lay her plans.
They nearly worked.…
He may have forgotten she had a key to the front hall closet; more likely he had forgotten nothing but simply could not credit the idea that even in this estrangement she might steal from him.
The suitcase of cash appeared in the closet on the occasional Thursday or Friday, whence it would be taken to Fort Keene on the weekend. There presumably it would be handed over to a pilot at the airstrip.
Heretofore she had believed these clandestine shipments of cash to be headed for numbered bank accounts in tax-haven countries where they would be deposited in behalf of a union leader or building inspector or zoning-ordinance politician.
Bert had done nothing to disabuse her of the idea. She’d even confronted him with it once and he’d retorted with predictable rationalizations—that if you wanted to do business at all you had to do it this way; when in Rome, etc.
Now she knew better. The pilots were accepting that cash in return for shipments of narcotics.
You can go with the kid. Or you can go with the kid and a suitcase full of cash. It’s Ellen’s legacy—Bert owes it to her—and besides let’s face it, disappearing with a year-old infant is going to be hard enough without having to scratch for a living at the same time.
So it needed to be a Thursday night when he came home from his banking rounds and locked the suitcase in the closet.
She was taken by surprise, therefore, when one Monday afternoon he came back from the office at half-past-three with Jack Sertic. She heard them in the living room; she heard the clink of ice in glasses and Bert’s voice: “Here you go. Okay, we can leave about midnight, drive up there easy, no traffic, meet the plane six o’clock in the morning. Get back here by one, two in the afternoon.”
“I think you’re right. It’s safer than sending errand boys.”
“Aeah. Go on home, take a nap. I’m going to get some sleep myself. Can’t keep the kind of hours I did when I was a kid. Meet me back here eleven thirty. I’ll tell Quirini to put up a couple Thermoses of coffee.”
She sat in the dining room ostensibly reading the Times until she heard Jack take his leave. Bert’s footfalls thudded along the carpeted hall. He looked in at her. “How you doing?”
“All right.” She returned his glance stonily, giving him nothing.
He gave her the benediction of a saintly smile—Take your time, darling, I’ve got all the patience in the world—and went away toward his room.
She decided to give it half an hour but the first twenty minutes took forever and that was all she could stand. She put her handbag on the hall table by the front closet, unlocked the door and looked inside. The suitcase was there. Locked—but heavy. No doubt of its contents. And the leather jacket with the diamonds sewn inside.
She hadn’t planned it this way. She hadn’t packed—not even a diaper in her handbag.
Hell, Matty, you can buy whatever you need. This is the bird in hand. Grab it.
Go. Run. Now.
She left the closet unlocked, left the handbag on the table, left her coat on its hanger; no point arousing the employees with clues. Unnerved and empty-handed she went back through the apartment toward the nursery.
When she passed the kitchen door she saw Philip Quirini emptying the dishwasher.
The nursery had been a second guest bedroom before Ellen’s birth. Now it was brightly wallpapered and stuffed toys were strewn everywhere on the floor and in the crib.
Marjorie was with the baby, feeding her with upended bottle.
Don’t hesitate. Look natural. Come on.
She swept right in. “I’ll do that.”
Marjorie surrendered the baby and the formula without remark and retreated into the corner with arms folded.
Cradling the baby, cooing while Ellen sucked at the nipple, she went out the nursery door with her pulse pounding so heavily it poured little black waves across her vision.
Past the kitchen door. Philip putting cups away on their hooks. Don’t go straight down the hall now; might make them suspicious. Go into the living room. Keep talking to the baby. Make it seem aimless—a random wandering through the apartment.
The glasses, half full with the ice mostly melted in them, remained on the bar from Jack Sertic’s visit. She carried the baby to the window and looked down at the avenue. Nothing remarkable down there: traffic crawling uptown in its usual afternoon snarl.