“Okay, we’ll play it safe. We’ll have Birmingham call his house, talk to his daughter if she’s there. If it’s not her in there and whoever it is refuses to come out, then we’ll sit it out till daylight.”
“Is the Mayor on his way?” Malone asked.
“Only if we know for certain that his wife is across the street.”
“What happens at daylight, if they refuse to come out?”
Lewton was glad of the darkness of the room. “Then I think it’ll be time for a collective decision.”
Lisa, struggling up out of the abyss of exhaustion, heard the phone ringing out in the living-room and in the other bedroom. It went on and on, with that monotonous insistence of the mechanical, and in just a few moments it was rubbing rawly against her nerves: Answer it, for God’s sake answer it! She looked across at Sylvia, who was also wide awake now.
“Someone must know we’re here! God, why don’t they answer it?”
“Listen! I think they’re arguing- “
Carole, pulling a wrap round her, had come out into the living-room, followed by Abel, who was still naked. The phone went on ringing, urgently and yet patiently, and in the corner of the room the television screen still showed its silent images. Carole reached for the phone, but Abel grabbed her hand.
“Don’t touch it, I tell you! It’s a trick- “
“What sort of trick? Who knows we’re here?”
“It could be your folks - “
That had been one of her few mistakes, to tell him that this cottage was her family’s; it would be the one clue he would have to her identity when she finally left him and disappeared again. The information had slipped out when he had asked her why she had chosen Sunday Harbor; even after four years she had not become fully professional at retaining her cover. She was proving every minute, as the phone was underlining now, that she was no more than an amateur in this whole game.
She drew her hand away from the phone, but he still kept his grip on her wrist. “You sure you didn’t tell someone tonight we were here?”
“No!” She could see suspicion and anger making him ugly; she sought desperately for a reason why the phone
should have rung: “Someone must have seen the car outside - “
“I’ll go put it in the garage.” He let go her wrist, massaged it gently with his fingers as the hardness slipped out of his face. “I’m sorry, baby. If some bastard is being curious we gotta get outa here before daylight.”
“Where shall we go?”
“Out to the boat - there’s nowhere else.”
Her parents’ boat, anchored at a mooring off the yacht club, had been another reason she had chosen Sunday Harbor. She knew how to handle it and it would have been easy to slip away in it during the time Abel would be away dumping both the car and the women. She would have been almost across to Bridgeport before he could have got back to Sunday Harbor.
The phone stopped ringing. Abel looked at it, then in the sudden silence lifted his head. “The storm - it’s going, baby! That’s only rain! We’re gonna be okay!”
He grabbed her, kissed her, then went quickly back into the front bedroom. Carole remained standing in the living-room, still afraid and now suddenly dispirited. A commercial had come on the television screen, but she stared at it without really seeing it. A woman walked into a bathroom, looked down into a toilet; in the water of the bowl was a motor cruiser, on its deck a handsome man in yachting cap and blazer; silently he offered the woman a package of toilet cleaner, then the cruiser slid away, presumably down the sewage pipes to a larger and less polluted pond. All at once Carole became aware of what she was seeing; suddenly angry with the imbecility of it all, she switched off the television set. The pinpoint of light died away on the darkened screen, the obliterated image of the announcer who was about to introduce the repeat of a special message by Mayor Michael Forte.
Abel came out, dressed now and pulling on a raincoat. “Get some clothes on, honey. Then you better get the dames dressed while I clean up around here.”
He went out through the kitchen, opened the back door. It was still dark, but he could tell at once that the rain was coming straight down now, not beating almost horizontally as it had been. He pulled up the collar of his raincoat, closed the back door and ran through the rain and round the corner of the house to the driveway. He was about to pull open the door of the car when the searchlight beam hit him. He staggered back against the wall of the house as if he had been hit a physical blow; he threw up his hands against the blinding glare and turned his face away. A cry of anger and shock escaped him, then he spun round and ran back into the house. He slammed the kitchen door shut, locked it and leaned against it, breathing heavily and trembling like a man who had just, unwittingly, put one foot over a precipice. Then he heard the phone in the living-room start to ring again.
In the kitchen of the house across the street Cartwright held the phone to his ear, then raised a warning hand to the others waiting around him. “This is the FBI. We have you surrounded. If you come out with your hands up, you won’t be hurt.”
Abel, on the other end of the line, snarled, “Screw you! You bastards get away or something’s gonna happen here you won’t like!”
Cartwright put his hand over the phone, looked at Lewton. “You better withdraw that squad car with the searchlight, Ken. This guy, whoever he is, sounds nasty.”
“Is my daughter there?” said Willard Birmingham. “Ask him if I can speak to her.”
Cartwright spoke into the phone again. “Is Julie Birmingham there?”
“Who?” Abel’s note of puzzlement was genuine. Who, for Christ’s sake, was Julie Birmingham? He had not bothered to look around the cottage since they had been here, but he had found nothing in his casual scrutiny of the rooms that Carole might be anyone but who she said she was. Now he looked at her and all at once knew who she was.
He felt suddenly even more angry; but what was worse, he also felt empty. Christ, why hadn’t she trusted him all the way? What other lies had she told him? “You Julie Birmingham? That your real name?”
Carole (Julie: it was a name she had never really discarded in her mind) hesitated, then nodded. “Who is it? Is it my parents?”
Abel stared at her, beginning to hate her. Jesus, how had she conned him, got him into this ? He was still getting over the shock of the searchlight blazing at him out there in the driveway and he could feel the nervousness in his hands, the beginning of another headache. He spoke into the phone again. “Who wants to talk to her?”
Across the street Willard Birmingham took the phone in the kitchen while Lewton went through and picked up the extension in the hallway. The curtains in the living-room had been drawn and the lights turned on; advertising where the police were did not matter now, unless the kidnappers were stupid enough to start sniping at the house. If they did that, then Lewton hoped Commissioner Hungerford was out here by that time to make the next decision.
Willard Birmingham said, “I’d like to talk to my daughter - please … Julie?” For a moment he looked as if he were about to break down; his face went slack and grey and he looked with pain at his wife. She stood close to him, her ear pressed against the phone as he held it to his own ear. Birmingham recovered and went on, “Julie dear, what’s going on ? How did you get into this terrible mess ? Do you have the Mayor’s wife and Mrs Malone with you?”
Julie (Carole: the name no longer meant anything, it was useless to her from now on) did her best to keep her voice steady. “Daddy, I’m sorry about this - I didn’t want you and Mother involved - “
Mrs Birmingham choked on a sob and her husband put his free arm around her. “We believe that, Julie - we know you didn’t mean to harm us. But we’re in it now and all we want to do is help you. You and Mark - “
“I did it for him, you understand that, don’t you?” Julie was weeping, unable to hold back the banked-up years of lost love. Her father and mother were wrong, would never change, but they had loved her and she had loved them and that was something she knew now would never change. But she had come to know it too late. “I don’t want to harm Mrs Forte and Mrs Malone. All I want is for Mark to go free - get them to agree to that, put Mark and the other men on the plane to Cuba - “
Abel grabbed the phone from her. “We gotta be with them now, you understand? Tell ‘em that, Pop - tell ‘em we gotta be on that plane for Cuba too! And the dames go with us - we’re gonna give ‘em back to you when we’re safe in Cuba!”
Lewton cut in on the extension. “This is Captain Lewton, of the New York Police Department. We’ll have to get back to you - we’ll have to check out with the District Attorney that you can go on that plane with those men - “
“You better see we do, man - “
“I’m not arguing with you,” said Lewton, trying to keep himself cool as well as the man listening to him. “It’s not my decision. I’m sure they’ll agree to what you ask, but I have to contact them first. We’ll be back to you. If you want to contact us, we’re right across the street from you, in Dr Royce’s house. The number is - “
“We got nothing more to say to you, man. You call us when you got the word.”
Lewton hung up, went back out to the kitchen. As he did so, Cartwright followed him. “I was listening on the bedroom extension, Ken. They don’t know anything about the Cubans and the Algerians refusing to let those guys in. They can’t have a TV set or a radio.”
“There’s a TV in our house,” said Birmingham. “Or there was when we closed it up.”
“The point is they don’t seem to have got the Mayor’s message,” said Special Agent Butlin, leaning forward with the impatience of a man who thought too much discussion
had gone on. “I suggest we get on to the TV and radio stations, tell them to cancel the running of those tapes at once - “
“That was the intention,” said Cartwright. He pulled his belt in another notch; he felt hungry, empty and lean. “We better do it through your Department, Ken.”
Lewton recognized the conflict; some day it would happen to him, he guessed. There was always a touch of the jackal in the young lions; Butlin, he was sure, would have a bit more than the usual. “I’ll talk to Headquarters now. How’s the weather?”
“The rain’s stopped,” said Sheriff Narvo and cocked his head. “Look, we got more than enough men outside to handle ‘em. It looks like there’s no more than two of them, the girl and the guy we saw out by the car. Let’s smoke ‘em out - we got plenty of gas - “
Lewton looked at Malone. “It’s still your call, Inspector. The safety of your wife and Mrs Forte is still our main consideration.”
“Let’s get ‘em out in the open first,” said Malone. “For one thing, I’d like to know my wife and Mrs Forte are still alive.”
“Of course they are!” Elizabeth Birmingham’s voice shook with emotion. “Our daughter is over there - she’s not a murderess!”
“It’s not your daughter who worries us,” said Lewton, the snarl of the man on the phone still echoing in his ear. “It’s the guy she’s’with.”
Malone and Jefferson stood in the Royce driveway behind some bushes, their backs pressed against the fieldstone of the house as they gazed across the street at the Birmingham cottage. The rain had stopped, the clouds were clearing and daylight crept tentatively up the eastern sky.
“We call this the piccaninny dawn back home,” said Malone. “When I was on the beat, it was the time of day when I always felt anything but a piccaninny, more like a bloody old man. Like I feel now.”
“It’s gonna be a fine day.” Then Jefferson realized what he had said. “The weather, anyway.”
Malone stared across the street at the white cottage slowly appearing out of the disappearing darkness. “Christ, I know Lisa is over there, but I have to keep telling myself it’s a fact. How many times have you been in this sort of situation?”
“You mean staking out a house? I’ve lost count.”
“I suppose I could add up the number of times it’s happened to me - I’m just beginning to realize that life’s much gentler for cops back home. Funny thing is, I can’t remember how I felt when it happened before.”
“Then, you would have been on the outside looking in. Now - ” He glanced at Malone, at the man who had aged so much in so few hours. “One thing’s for sure, you wouldn’t have been as worried as you are now.”
“No, I’m not thinking about the worrying. I’m thinking about the law and order bit. If I could get at them, I think I’d kill that bloke and that girl. I can’t see any reason why the world wouldn’t be better off without them. A cop’s not supposed to think like that.”
Jefferson looked across the street. Most of the houses could be seen clearly now, a varied lot that ranged from neat Gape God cottages to the large ranch house beside which they stood; this was where the fortunate few came for a few months of the year and an occasional weekend to forget the pressures that ran their lives the rest of the time. He did not blame them for their desire to escape; he, even more than they, knew how interminable was the fight that faced them. Then he remembered the three-room, cold-water flat in which he and his three brothers and sisters had been born and raised, from which the only escape for his mother and father had been death. Some people, including the Birming-
ham girl across the street, didn’t know when they were well off.
Then Lewton came down the drive, keeping close to the side of the house. “The Mayor and the Commissioner are on their way out here by helicopter. We’ve been told to offer them the deal they want - free passage for all of them to Cuba. I’m afraid we’ll have to let your wife and Mrs Forte go with them, Scobie.”
Malone looked at him sharply. “Have the Cubans changed their minds?”
“No. The idea is to get those people out of that house. An aircraft is standing by at Kennedy and we’ll escort them in there. Once they’re out in the open, we can see who we’re dealing with and maybe do something - don’t ask me what, but something. If we come up with nothing, then we’ll let them board the plane and it can head for Cuba and we’ll just have to plead with the Cubans to play ball for the women’s sake.”
“In the meantime what happens to my wife and Mrs Forte?”
There was enough daylight for Malone to see the blank look on Lewton’s face. “What else can you suggest? Your wife and Mrs Forte are the aces in this hand - and the kidnappers are holding them. Right now our only hope is to go along with them and hope - wait for them to make a mistake.”