At the Point of a. 38

13

That commercial was followed by another.

“And all we’re doing is sitting here,” Helen complained.

Shayne turned down the volume. “Who’s Lou Solomon?”

“One of the big Jewish fund-raisers. Rich? It goes without saying.” He turned Helen’s wrist so he could see what her watch was telling them. “But what’s going on up there, will you kindly tell me?”

“What’s supposed to be going on?”

Helen moved restlessly. Gold shook her wrist without letting go.

“I’ll fill you in, Shayne, and when the news breaks we’ll go our separate ways. Give me a slight idea how much you know.”

“Helen told me quite a bit.”

“To get him to go, Murray!” she said. “He planted himself down as though he planned to stay all day. You were due any minute.”

“You used to be a hot pro-Israel man yourself,” Shayne said. “I seem to remember some arguments about whether or not they should take your money.”

“A long time ago,” Gold said. “And if I’d gone on acting one hundred percent pure, where would I be right now? In Ramleh prison, on indeterminate sentence, and I’d be dead in six months. I’ve got a heart condition, I’m a physical wreck. So when an Arab was willing to talk to me, I shouldn’t extend him the courtesy?”

“Murray-Daddy-” Helen said. “That’s ancient history. Tell him about it, but in a nutshell.”

“I needed their help with the bust-out, and that went off fine. And there I was, didn’t have a cent to my name, and all my friends were either scared to see me or I couldn’t find them. How I needed those Black September guys. They bought me some clothes and an airplane ticket, and they carried in a suitcase for me. But after they got over here, this is my neck of the woods and the shoe was turned around, they needed me. They had no phone numbers at all. Of course I let them think I’m bigger than I really am any more. But with help from this dear child here, I worked it. Though I’m willing to state for the tape recorder that she didn’t know she was doing anything against the law.”

“At the beginning,” Shayne said.

“She’s a bright kid,” Gold agreed, giving her leg a pat.

“Who had the idea for the kidnapping, you?”

The question embarrassed Gold slightly. “It came up. They’ve been wanting to pull some kind of trick in this country. Everything sort of fitted in. There’s this oil sheik who had a standing invitation to visit some big muckymuck in Boca Raton. They found out when the committee was having the quarterly meeting in Miami Beach, and timed it to overlap. All right!” he said defensively. “But what they don’t realize is that this won’t cut into the flow of funds at all. Wait till you see next month’s totals. Every Jew in America will bring out his checkbook. I grant you-it’ll be a big boost for the Arabs if it works.” He smiled slightly. “But not if they blow it.”

“Explain that,” Shayne said, and Helen added, “Quickly?”

“Artie and me supplied the vehicles,” Gold explained, “but before I turned them over I stuck in a couple of bombs. Timed to go off just about now.”

“The ping-pong balls!” Helen said.

“Incendiaries. You know what we’re talking about, Shayne? All the arsonists have been using them lately.”

On the radio a voice began speaking in great excitement. When Shayne turned up the sound, it proved to be merely the regular announcer praising a liquid floor wax.

“Goddamn it,” Gold said, worried. “They wouldn’t hold back a piece of news like that. They’d put it out right away.”

The girl put in, “If anything’s wrong, Murray, isn’t it all the more reason for you and I to be heading out to sea?”

“I kept hearing how everything had to be timed, to the goddamned second,” Gold said. “A guy named Rashid. I saw him work at Ramleh, and the cat is good. He’d be a colonel in any army in the world. When he said something would happen at such and such a time, that’s when it happened or some heads got chopped. We got the cars to them at a quarter to eleven. Game-time was eleven sharp.”

“I was talking to the manager of the St. A. when they walked in,” Shayne said. “Eleven o’clock straight up.”

“Eleven forty-five now,” Gold said, checking the watch. “Even if they ran into trouble right away, we ought to be hearing about it. They were going to collect everybody in Solomon’s room. Nine men on the committee, but a couple aren’t getting in till this afternoon. They had everybody’s room number. Like with the manager, they were going to take his secretary and everybody else in the office, to keep the lid on as long as they could. Phase one was fifteen minutes. If they couldn’t find somebody, forget it. Then down to the lobby for the announcement. They had a bullhorn. Rashid figured out the best place to stand. Eleven-twenty. ‘I’m Rashid Abd El-Din, known to my friends as the Palestinian Superman. The vile Jews, blah, blah, blah. We want one million apiece, and we want to see it at the airport in exactly one hour, sixty minutes. An airplane, and get it gassed up and rolled out on a runway, all by itself, with a full crew. And no monkey business or all the Jews will get killed. Which they’re used to, of course.’ Any questions? No questions. Off to the airport.”

“Taking everybody?”

“Just the committee. There were eight Arabs to start with, one kid didn’t make it in time. Just about one on one. I tried to tell them it would take over an hour to scrape up that much cash. What do you think, Shayne?”

“Six or seven million? Banks, racetracks.”

“His big point was that he didn’t want to get into one of those long negotiations, with everybody armed on both sides and getting more and more nervous. That’s why he didn’t make any demands on Israel. Everybody knows they don’t pay blackmail, period. If they didn’t have the cash by the deadline, too bad for the hostages. The hour was supposed to start at eleven-twenty. So what’s happening? I set those timers for eleven-forty, to go off about halfway between the Beach and the airport. They’re distributed like this. Three Arabs in a limousine, the rest in a hearse, two in the front seat, two in back with the Jews. They’re bowling along at fifty or sixty miles an hour. Bang. The guy who sold me the ping-pong balls said those flames are going to shoot thirty feet in the air. The explosion comes up through the floorboards and takes out the driver. They’re going to rack up, aren’t they? That takes out the limo. The hearse slams on its brakes. Thirty seconds later, another bang. I jammed the back doors so they wouldn’t lock. They fly open and six or seven Jews and two Arabs spill out on the highway. I think we can take them, if we jump fast enough. There’s going to be plenty of confusion, and that’s all to the good. The bomb in the hearse, I put it in on the right, and hopefully that’s where Rashid is going to be riding. The others aren’t in his class.”

“Murray,” the girl said admiringly, “you know you’re sort of a genius? Now can I make a suggestion? While we’re talking why don’t I divide the money?”

“Shayne wants to be in on that.”

“Get it up off the floor where I can see it,” Shayne said. “Do it by packages, throw one over and keep one.”

“And don’t try any razzle-dazzle,” Gold said. “He said half, and if we don’t give him half he’ll hold it against us.”

Shayne stepped up the volume again. Fifty minutes had now passed since the Arabs walked into Manny Farber’s office. The St. Albans was one of the long row of Collins Avenue hotels, almost as closely spaced as the two-family houses in Homestead Beach. The Fontainebleau security officer had listened intently to Shayne’s call, and had seemed to take it seriously. So where were the police?

“One for you,” the girl said. “One for us. This is fun.”

“Any ideas, Shayne?” Gold said after a moment.

“Yeah,” Shayne said slowly. “Did these guys trust you?”

“Not an inch. Trust me? You know Barney, the bondsman. They told him how he could find me, and he had a good financial reason to do it. That way I’d be tied up so I couldn’t call the cops and have them waiting at the hotel. I sneaked out of it O.K., but it damn near worked.”

“So why would they give you the right timetable?”

Gold’s eyes slitted down. “You said they put the snatch on Farber exactly at eleven.”

“But they didn’t make an announcement in the lobby at eleven-twenty, or we’d know it by now. This is a new kind of operation for them. If they’re smart they’ll try to keep it quiet until they’re gone-all the way out of the country. After they picked out the hostages they wanted, I think they left the others locked up in the hotel. Helen said that you and Rashid were looking at diagrams. He wouldn’t need diagrams if he was really planning to walk out the front door with all the guns showing.”

“They have to run a press conference somewhere, why not at the hotel? They’re perfectly safe, nobody’s going to shoot at them as long as they’ve got those hostages. Be serious, an hour isn’t a hell of a lot of time to raise six million bucks. You mentioned the racetracks. The money’s there, but somebody’s going to have to persuade those guys.”

“This is political. The Arabs didn’t come here to make money.”

“I grant you, but why would they pass up six or seven million bucks? They have expenses, like everybody.”

“Maybe their minds don’t work like yours, Murray. If they can pull it off, they’ll be famous. Money will pour in.”

“One for Mike Shayne, one for us,” Helen murmured.

Gold closed his eyes briefly, so he wouldn’t be distracted. His forehead tightened.

“Give me another jolt of cognac.”

Shayne passed him the flask. Gold drank. His eyes opened.

“Let’s don’t fuck around collecting ransom,” he said. “Kill them all.”

“They’re terrorists. One of the things terrorists do is kill people.”

“That was their first idea,” Gold went on, speaking slowly. “Wait till the chairman called the committee to order and walk in and turn the tommy guns loose. But then what? They’d be wiped out themselves. I wondered about Rashid sometimes, but the rest of them definitely didn’t want to die. And I made it clear to them that I wouldn’t go along with anything like that.”

“But you would go along with a kidnapping for ransom. So they worked up one plan for your benefit, and a real plan. They’ll keep the hostages alive as long as they have some value, and kill them in the plane.”

“Maybe,” Gold said tightly, drinking again.

“You’ve done a lousy thing here, Murray, and if they get away with it, people are going to say some unfriendly things about you.”

“Why should he care?” Helen said.

“He cares. He’s been careful with his reputation all these years, and all of a sudden he’s smuggling shit and helping a bunch of fanatics to kidnap some of the country’s top Jews. If the bombs work, fine. Good old Murray Gold. Crooked as they come, but what a conniver. The heroin won’t be mentioned-I’m being well paid to forget about that. The story would be that he heard about the plan in prison, and swindled his way in so he could blow them up at the last minute. Who knows, Murray? The government might even withdraw some of those contempt charges so you can come back and die in your home town.”

“I’m not ready to die yet,” Gold said. “Do you know what I’m starting to think? That before they went anywhere, the bastards looked under the hood and found the bombs. You’ve got a phone. Call the airport. Tell them who’s on the way.”

“And how many lives would that save? The minute the shooting starts, the hostages will get it in the head. No, let’s do some more guessing. Do they have anybody who can fly an airplane?”

Gold looked up quickly. “Goddamn it, yes. He was in on the break with us. Pilot in the Syrian air force.”

“So they won’t hijack a plane. They can steal one. At Miami International they’d have a hard time getting off the ground. Did Rashid and Sergeant Tibbett know each other?”

Gold said, “No,” but Helen contradicted him. “Yes, they did, Murray. He didn’t drive off right away that night. He waited till Marian left and they went someplace. Now there. I contributed something. Can we please get this conversation over with?”

“How much would Tibbett charge to let them into Homestead?” Shayne said.

“About three dollars and fifty cents.”

“He wasn’t as trashy as all that,” Helen said. “All he wanted was a chance at some illegal bread, and you’re in no position to criticize, Mr. Murray Gold.”

Shayne, abstractedly, had been stacking the packages of money as they rained down on the seat beside him. Now he picked out one of the hundred dollar bills and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. With an abrupt change of manner, he looked at it more closely.

“Shayne?” Gold said, watching.

“Maybe I made this deal too fast,” Shayne said. He took a genuine hundred from his wallet and looked at the two bills together, showing more and more concern. Gold leaned forward. The girl caught the sudden tension and looked from one to the other. Shayne grunted.

“You’ve been taken, Murray. These are rags.” Gold snatched the bills out of Shayne’s hands. “Impossible.”

He put on his close-range glasses and compared them, moving his head in quick birdlike pecks. “I don’t see anything wrong. I know a queer bill when I see one.”

“Look at Ben Franklin’s collar.”

Using a pencil, Shayne pointed out the small imperfection Coddington had shown him. Gold picked it up at once. Swearing, he crumpled the counterfeit in his fist.

“Daddy!” Helen cried. “Is it true? After all this?”

“That’s what happens when you do business with crooks,” Shayne said. “They aren’t worrying about keeping your good will. You’ll be in Uruguay.”

“I haven’t left yet,” Gold said in a low voice.

Helen plunged into the open satchel and pulled her hands out filled with money. “It’s no good? It’s counterfeit? Murray, you goddamn old fart, couldn’t you check?”

“So our deal’s off,” Shayne said. “I could probably get five or ten thousand for my share, but that’s too much risk for too little money. Sorry, Murray. I’ll have to take you in.”

“But it’s weird!” Helen said. “Artie’s dead. Marian’s dead, I guess. All those poor Jews. And we get paid off in funny money.”

After a moment, Gold gave one of his small shrugs. “I don’t like to be conned, but at least I’m out of that goddamn prison. I’ve had some excitement and a little sex. I knew the odds.” He changed glasses. “Now what are we going to do about these Black September bastards?”

“From here, there isn’t much we can do.”

“I can’t do anything,” Gold said briskly. “I’m old and slow. You’ll have to beat them to Homestead and knock them off, one at a time.”

“Seven Arabs, armed with GI issue submachine guns.”

“Did I say it would be easy?” Gold said.

There was a sudden flurry of action further along the beach. Gold turned his head sharply. Shayne followed the look, and saw a man and a woman in a silent struggle at the edge of the water. The man was trying to break her grip on a long-barrelled pistol. It was Coddington.

There was a bright dancing haze behind them, and until they staggered further up on the sand Shayne didn’t recognize the woman.

“Esther Landau,” he said.

“Who?” Gold said sharply. “Who?”