Stolen Away

19

The furniture in my corner room was sparse-bed, nightstand, small table, dresser. There were faded places on the wallpaper where framed photos, paintings, mirrors or whatever had once hung. Wind rattled the boarded-up windows, fighting to get in, somewhat successfully. Cozy it wasn’t, but the bed had clean sheets and sufficient blankets, so I thanked God and Gus the caretaker for small favors. I stripped to my underwear-wishing I’d worn long johns-and settled in. I had a lot on my mind, but it had been a long, strange day, and sleep took me quickly.

I awoke just as quickly, when-how long after, I’m not sure-my door creaked open and a small female figure stood there; light from the hall made a shapely silhouette through a sheer nightgown, a nicely top-heavy silhouette that I recognized, even sleep-dazed, as Evalyn’s.

“Nate,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

“Sure,” I said, sitting up. Actually, I was awake-the kind of wide awake you can be when you’re startled into it.

She shut the door and the room went nearly black. I could barely make her shape out in the darkness; she was standing next to me, next to the bed, but I sensed her more than saw her. For one thing, she smelled good, cloaked in a perfume that suggested night-blooming jasmine. Then light flashed-a match-as she lit a red candle on my nightstand, a nightstand incidentally that bore no lamp.

In the flickery light from the candle, she stood before me with her beautiful breasts outlined under the sheer black nightgown, their rosy tips staring at me like wide eyes. Speaking of which, Evalyn’s eyes were themselves round and staring-in a pale, haunted face.

“Nate,” she said, “forgive me for this intrusion.”

I threw back the covers. “You’re forgiven.”

She climbed in bed and I threw the covers back up over her, and me. She was shivering.

“You’ve caught a chill,” I said.

“No,” she said.

“What is it then?”

“You’ll think I’m foolish.”

“No I won’t.”

“I…I was in bed, almost asleep. I heard footsteps on the stairs. I wondered who might be coming up. First I thought it might be Inga, but the sounds went right by Inga’s room and came toward mine.”

She pulled the covers around her, tighter. I slipped my arm around her; she was trembling like a frightened deer.

“As they…they reached my door, these footsteps, they stopped. I thought that any moment, whoever it was would enter my room. I thought, perhaps, it was you…after last night, perhaps a midnight rendezvous….”

“I haven’t been out of my room, Evalyn.”

She nodded, as if she knew that already. “Across from my room is a doorway to the stairs to the third floor-which is shut off. I don’t even know where the key is. I heard footsteps going up those stairs. Then I heard the footsteps above me. Above the ceiling of my room.”

“Maybe it’s Inga.”

“I don’t think so. I got up, went into the hallway. The third-floor door was locked.”

“It wasn’t me up, wandering. You don’t think Means doubled back, for some reason?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. The caretaker doesn’t live on the grounds; he has a little place in Bradley Hills. Why would he be stalking around?”

“If you’re concerned…”

“It could be one of the kidnappers, checking us out, couldn’t it?”

“It’s possible.”

She turned to me; her eyes were as frightened as they were lovely. “Can I stay with you tonight?”

“You talked me into it. What about Inga? Are you concerned about what she might think…?”

“I have no secrets from Inga. Could we block the door?”

I told her we could; I got out of bed, moved the dresser in front of the door, and got my nine millimeter out of my travel bag and put it on the nightstand.

“Slide over,” I told her. I wanted to be next to the gun.

She slid over. “I’m a damned fool.”

“This house would give Frankenstein the willies.” I climbed in bed next to her. “Look, it could’ve been your imagination. You might’ve been dreaming, or hearing night sounds…”

“It is a noisy night.”

“Sure. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

“Hold me, would you, Nate? Hold me.”

I held her.

“Don’t blow out the candle,” she said.

“I won’t.”

“Why do you put up with me?”

“I like women with big money and big breasts.”

“You’re terrible.”

“You really think so?”

“No.”

The wind shook the windows, boards and glass alike; she grabbed me. She was terrified. So I kissed her, just to settle her down. It led to more.

“You must think I’m terrible,” she said, later.

“Not at all.”

“You think I’m shallow. You think I’m silly.”

“Sure. But not terrible.”

She laughed; it was a husky laugh. “I’m getting old, Nate. These breasts of mine are starting to droop.”

“Not that I can see. Anyway, I’ll be glad to lift ’em for you-anytime.”

“You. You.”

I kissed her again. She seemed to have forgotten about her kidnapper or ghost or whatever-it-was making footsteps in the hall and above the ceiling. Or had she invented that to find a way into my room, without looking “terrible”?

“That’s an ominous-looking thing.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.

“I mean the gun.”

“Oh. Well, ominous is a good way for a gun to look.”

“Have…have you ever killed anyone with it?”

“Yes. I killed a kidnapper not so long ago. That’s why Lindy thinks I’m a prince.”

“You talk about it so…casually.”

“I’m not really casual about it, Evalyn. I don’t ever mean to use a gun casually. That gun of all guns….”

“What about that gun?”

I didn’t say anything.

“What is it, Nate?”

“Evalyn, I…nothing.”

“What?”

“Well. Look, I’ll be frank with you. I might’ve dismissed you as a silly, shallow woman, if it weren’t for some of what you’ve been through. If you don’t mind my saying.”

“Such as?”

I swallowed. “Losing your son.”

She touched my face.

I touched her face.

She said, “You lost somebody, too, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“Nate…are you…?”

I wiped my face with my hand; the hand came away wet. “No. Sweating. These blankets.”

“Who, Nate? Who did you lose?”

And I told her. I told her slowly, and in detail, about my father. About what I’d done to make him use my gun on himself. About how I carried that gun so I wouldn’t forget.

“But I do forget sometimes,” I admitted. “Life and death are cheap in this lousy goddamn world. Particularly in this lousy goddamn depression.”

“I’m not by nature contemplative,” she said, hugging my arm, staring into the near-darkness. “But the thing I wonder about most is why the universe is geared so to cruelty.”

I kissed her forehead.

The wind was settling down, now; it was making a whistling, almost soothing sound.

“Why don’t you tell me about your son? Tell me about your little boy.”

She did. For perhaps an hour, she told me of her “sweet and preternaturally wise” little boy. Little Vinson was the only ghost in the house, as the candle burned down and night turned to morning, and he was not a sinister presence.

A few hours later, the footsteps in the hall and the thought of ghosts seemed foolish to us as we went down for breakfast. Evalyn was wearing a casual black-and-white frock; I’d been allowed to abandon the chauffeur’s uniform for one of my two suits. Inga was fixing bacon and eggs-Gus the caretaker had dropped off some fresh supplies, it seemed-and the smells of the food and the morning were refreshing.

But Inga seemed even gloomier than usual.

We sat at an unpretentious square table in the kitchen as Inga served us our eggs and bacon and toast with a side order of bloodshot, black-circled eyes.

“My dear,” Evalyn said to the maid, “you must have had a dreadful night!”

Inga said nothing.

“Serve yourself, dear,” Evalyn told her, “and join us.”

Sullenly, Inga did. Her blonde hair hung in strings as she poked at her food. Suddenly she looked up, her eyes as wide and haunted as Evalyn’s had been when she entered my room the night before.

“Madam, if it is just the same to you, could I please change my room tonight?”

“Why, dear?”

“Somebody kept pulling the sheets off my bed every time I went to sleep.”

“Inga,” I said, “is there a lock on your door?”

“Yes-and I used it.”

“And your windows are boarded up, like mine?”

“Yes.”

Evalyn leaned forward, her blue eyes piercing. “You mean to say, Inga, that someone pulled the sheets off your bed when you were alone in the room, with the door locked and the windows boarded up?”

“Yes. Several times this happened. I hardly sleep.”

“You don’t think anybody was hiding in your room or anything?” I asked.

“I had a flashlight,” she said. “I looked under the bed, and in the closet. I was alone.”

“I’ll take that room tonight,” I told her.

For the first time Inga smiled at me. “Thank you, Mr. Heller.”

“With any luck,” Evalyn said, cheerfully, “before then, Means will show up and we’ll take delivery of ‘the book’ and be well out of this funhouse.”

But Means didn’t show.

We spent most of the day, Evalyn and I, walking the weedy, snow-patched grounds, threading through the tall bony naked trees, following paths Evalyn’s mother had traced. Often we held hands, like kids going steady; maybe, in a way, that’s what we were.

That afternoon, elderly, lanky, grossly mustached Gus-who chewed tobacco that he smelled just a little worse than-opened the door to the long-unused third floor. Gus claimed to have the only key, and the door seemed not to have been used in a while-and the caretaker had a hell of a hard time working the key in that rusty lock.

There were no ghosts on the third story other than a few more pieces of sheet-covered furniture. A layer of dust coated the floor, undisturbed by footprints.

Evalyn, standing just behind me, her fingers on my arm, said, “I must have just heard noises the wind made.”

“Must have,” I said.

I didn’t believe in haunted houses, of course, but then lately I’d been exposed to the likes of Edgar Cayce, Sister Sarah Sivella and Chief Yellow Feather, and I was starting to think we ought to start looking for Lindy’s kid in a magician’s top hat.

That evening was just as cold as the previous one, and we again huddled in the kitchen, drinking coffee, wearing blankets, waiting for either Means to show up or the phone to ring or at least some goddamn ghost to materialize. Nothing did.

Evalyn and I spent the night in the room Inga had abandoned. We sat up virtually all night, when we weren’t otherwise entertaining ourselves; Evalyn smoked a pack of cigarettes, and I ran out of Sheiks. It was a long, tiring, memorable night, but no ghosts showed, no footsteps sounded in the hall or on the stairs or on the ceiling, and nobody, flesh or vapor, pulled the covers off.

She had fallen asleep in my arms, both of us half-sitting up, pillows behind us, blankets sheathing us. Light seeped through the cracks of the boarded-up windows. The long night was over.

As I was getting out of bed, I heard something fall heavily to the floor; I jumped, and Evalyn jumped awake.

“What…?” she began.

I stood, frozen, looking at a small table against the side wall, where four or five books were in the process of tumbling to the floor, from between two secure bronze horse-head bookends.

I looked at her.

She looked at me.

Our eyes would’ve been right at home in a minstrel show.

I walked slowly over to the table. The books were on the floor, in an ungainly heap. The bookends stood alone, on the table but flush against the wall, as had been the books, before they fell. It was as if someone had shoved them on the floor; only the wall was where the books would have to have been shoved from.

I shrugged, said it was nothing, started getting my clothes on. Evalyn nodded, shrugged, padded down the hall to her own room to dress. We said nothing more about it, not over breakfast anyway; we said almost nothing at all, actually, except to comment on what a nice sunny day it was for a change.

Shortly after breakfast the phone jangled out in the hall and scared the hell out of all of us. The rings echoed through the big, mostly empty house, as Evalyn rushed to answer.

She held the receiver sideways so I could stand next to her and listen.

“Hogan speaking,” said the voice of Gaston Means. “Who is this?”

“This is Eleven,” Evalyn said.

“Eleven, we couldn’t get through with the book last night. We had a close call.”

“A close call?”

“Listen carefully: come to my home at Chevy Chase this afternoon. Be very, very careful of your movements; make certain you’re not followed. I’ll see you there at half past two.”

And we heard the click of him hanging up.

She looked at me, phone still in her hand. “I’m going, of course.”

“Not alone.” I touched her shoulder, firmly. “This could be a replay of the Maude King ‘accident.’”

“Come with me, then. He didn’t say I couldn’t bring my chauffeur.”

So early that afternoon I put on my chauffeur’s uniform and, with her navigating, found my way to Chevy Chase, in Maryland just across the state line from the District of Columbia. The neighborhood was residential and affluent, albeit not affluent in the Evalyn Walsh McLean sense. The house at 112 Leland was a big white two-story pillared number with a spacious, sloping lawn behind a wire-mesh fence-a comfy castle with the prisonlike touch of the fence and, here and there, floodlights mounted to posts. My guess was alarms and switches were hooked up, as well-Means had invested in a considerable security system.

The gate was open, however-we were expected, at least Evalyn was-and I stood behind her with my chauffeur’s cap in my hands as she rang the bell. A tall, slender youth of perhaps sixteen, neat as a pin in a diamond-patterned sweater and gray slacks, answered the door.

“We’re here to see Mr. Means,” Evalyn said, smiling.

The boy nodded; his eyes were large, brown, guileless.

“Please come in,” he said, and we did.

The house was as neat, as orderly, as the boy’s apparel. Well furnished, in the Early American mode. The people who lived here weren’t rich exactly, but they were clearly successful.

“I think my father is expecting you,” the boy said.

Means’s voice boomed down. “Hello there! Come on up!”

We went up the staircase, leaving the boy behind, and there, on the landing, stood Means-as disheveled as his house wasn’t. His brown suit rumpled, his tie loose, his eyes bloodshot, his breath boozy, his face sweat-slick, Means ushered us into a cluttered den past a table on which was a Rube Goldberg contraption consisting of a long board with four dry-cell batteries, a big light bulb and a reflector.

The big moon-faced bastard fell heavily into the chair behind his messy desk. “God, Eleven! What a close call we had last night.”

“What do you mean, Means?”

“Call me ‘Hogan,’ Eleven. I must insist. Should we talk in front of your chauffeur?”

“I’m agent Sixteen,” I said, “remember?”

“If you’re a police spy,” Means said enigmatically, “the Lindbergh boy will bear the burden.”

“Tell us about your close call,” I said. I found Evalyn a chair, clearing off some letters and old newspapers. I stood, cap in hand. The cap was covering the nine millimeter in my waistband.

“I went to the place the baby is being kept,” Means said darkly, sitting forward, hands locked prayerlike.

“Where was it?” Evalyn asked.

“I can’t divulge that,” Means said, with a regretful wag of his massive bald noggin. “I gave my word to the criminals I wouldn’t share their location with anyone. But I will say it’s within a hundred miles of Washington.”

“Did you see him?” Evalyn asked, breathlessly. “Did you see Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr.?”

“Yes,” Means said, matter-of-factly, his dimples cute as a baby’s behind. “I held the boy in my arms. He had blue eyes, blond hair, was dressed in a knitted cap, buff coat, brown shoes and white stockings. The age and appearance tallied with everything I’ve seen and heard about the child.”

Evalyn looked at me yearningly; she longed to believe this.

“What about the close call?” I said.

Means narrowed his eyes, cocked his head, sat forward. “Last night, sometime after midnight, we started out from the gang’s headquarters in two cars. I was traveling in the lead car. The Fox, with the baby in tow, was in the second. I was to keep an eye out for police. If I saw the police were stopping cars and searching them, I was to use my invention…” He pointed to the Rube Goldberg contraption with the light bulb. “…and signal the car behind, where the Fox was with the baby. I was to flash the light three times.”

Evalyn glanced at me; she seemed excited. She was buying this.

“Along toward three in the morning,” Means continued, “we were nearly to Far View when I saw a car stopped by a policeman up ahead. I flashed my light three times, and the car behind me turned and went back.”

“Back?” I asked.

“To the hideout,” he said, melodramatically.

This guy ought to have been on the radio.

“Back at the hideout,” he went on, “the Fox and the rest of the boys were jittery as june bugs. The Fox said the deal was definitely off, as far as Far View being the drop point was concerned.”

Evalyn looked at me anxiously and saw my skepticism. She turned back to Means and said, “This sounds pretty queer to me….”

Means affected a hurt expression. Grandly, he opened a desk drawer and removed a brown-paper package fastened with red sealing wax.

“There’s your hundred thousand, Eleven,” he said. “Take your money back, if you want to pull out.”

Evalyn shook her head no. “I don’t want to pull out-as long as there’s the slightest chance we’ll get that baby back, I’m in.”

He plucked a letter opener from the mess on his desk and cut the cord on the package; the paper came loose and revealed green bills on top. Then he plucked from the package a tag, which he handed toward Evalyn. She took it. Read it. Handed it to me.

It said:

GASTON B. MEANS

Property of Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean

“I put this on the package,” he said, taking back the tag, “for your protection. Should I meet my death in this endeavor, your money will be returned.”

I knew just eyeballing it that that package wasn’t big enough to hold one hundred grand in small currency; but I would have to tell her later. And was his desk drawer the “safe” he’d told me the money was locked away in?

“I’ll resume negotiations,” he said to her, “if you wish.”

“Do that,” she said curtly. “I’m leaving Far View and returning to 2020. Keep me informed-we’ll work out a new drop point. But if you’re not on the level, you’ll finish your days behind bars.”

She sounded as melodramatic as Means; but she wasn’t lying.

“Eleven,” he said somberly, “you saw that fine boy of mine downstairs, didn’t you? The very thought of him would prevent me from doing anything wrong-that boy’s my life, now.”

We left Means and his messy den and his neat house and fine boy and we sat in the powder-blue Lincoln, talking.

“You think he’s lying, don’t you, Nate?”

“I know he’s lying. The trouble is, with a con man like him, he’s probably building on some truth. He’s had a few kernels of inside information-the question is, where has he gotten it? How close is he to the actual kidnappers?”

Her mouth was a thin determined line. “I have to follow this out to its conclusion.”

“Why don’t you let me put the Treasury boys on this? Tracking this cellmate of his, the ‘Fox,’ if he exists, would be a snap.”

“No! No. That might spoil everything…the child might suffer…”

She sounded like Lindbergh now.

“These T-men are the boys who got Capone,” I said. “They can…”

“No. If you do, I’ll call Ogden and quash it, Nate, I really will.”

“Ogden?”

“Ogden Mills. Secretary of the Treasury Mills.”

Now she really sounded like Lindbergh.

“Okay, Evalyn. Okay. But I’m afraid this is where I get off. I’ll drive you back to Far View, but my advice to you is to turn Means over to the authorities. You might still get your money back, and some information about the kidnapping, to boot.”

“No,” she said, firmly.

I spoke through a strained smile. “You know what today is, Evalyn? April first. April Fool’s Day.”

“That’s cruel.”

“You said it yourself: it’s a cruel universe.”

“Promise me, Nate. Promise me you won’t interfere.”

“Evalyn-”

“Promise me. Promise!”

She touched my cheek; her eyes mingled hope and despair.

“All right,” I sighed. “All right.”

So I drove her back to Far View. We didn’t speak. We weren’t mad at each other, exactly. But we didn’t speak.

In the second-floor room, where Evalyn and I had sat waiting for ghosts the night before, I packed my clothes and my gun and left the room to the poltergeists. As I came down the stairs, Inga said I’d had a phone message while I was away and handed me a small folded piece of paper; I slipped it in my pocket without glancing at it, as Evalyn was approaching.

“Why don’t I drive you and Inga back to 2020?” I asked.

“I can drive myself,” Evalyn said, without rancor. “I don’t really need a chauffeur, you know. It’s just another of the empty luxuries in my life.”

“Evalyn-I know you mean well in this. But you’re in over your head.”

“It’s only money, Nate. If I can save that child…”

“Evalyn…” I looked around; we were in the kitchen, alone, waiting for Gus the caretaker to collect me and take me to the train. I gave her a long, lingering kiss.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

She touched my face again.

“I’ll be waiting,” she said.

As I went out to get in Gus’s pickup truck, she stood watching me from the back doorway, like another ghost in that damn haunted house.

In the pickup, I unfolded Inga’s message; it was from Breckinridge.

It said: “Jafsie has heard from John.”