Necessity

46

Driving the Jeep through town she is thinking: maybe there is some way Charlie and I can include each other in our futures.

She still can taste his mouth. Preoccupied, she nearly rear-ends a little car when it stops abruptly. Its bald driver begins to jockey it into a parallel parking space. Irritated, she leans on the horn when she pulls out to get past. Then she misses the light and bucks to an awkward stop and feels a flush across her face when in the mirror she sees a police car right behind her.

It follows her several blocks and she clenches the wheel until her knuckles turn white but finally the police car turns off behind her and she drives on out of town at a sedate speed, waiting for the tremor in all her fibers to dwindle.

Look, it could have been worse. Suppose you’d run the red light? You could be spending the next half hour explaining things to a justice of the peace.

Quit jumping at shadows. You need to have your wits about you this morning.

The road forks and narrows; it’s a darker day here in the trees. Climbing into the soft hills she feels a chill bite in the air. Strong scent of pine sap here.

Charlie …

No. One thing at a time. Ellen comes first.

She watches the mirror anxiously but there’s nothing behind her. Never mind that; they’ll be chasing soon enough.

The Jeep runs easily along turnings she knows by heart, carrying her across a range of wooded hills and down the length of a valley-a slow country road that undulates beside the stream. Birch forest here-in twenty minutes there’ll be pines as the road takes her higher.

The air is emphatically clean, washed by yesterday’s rain. Sunlight dapples the water and throws striking shadows across the white tree trunks that march beside the road. The day is aflutter with dragonflies; a chirruping of cicadas is loud enough to be heard over the grinding whine of the Jeep’s heavy-duty transmission. Fields of merry goldenrod climb the slopes beyond the stream.

Got to think clearly now. All the things that may go wrong-the things she didn’t mention to Charlie. What if there are new dogs? What if the locks or the burglar alarm have been changed? What if they’ve moved the nursery to some other room? What if Ellen isn’t here at all?

What if it’s like the last time and it goes crucially wrong? What if this time you don’t get away at all?

What if they know you’re coming and they’re waiting for you?

Last time in a strange way it was easier than this because she hadn’t been through it before and she hadn’t really thought about all the things that could go wrong. The advantage presented itself; she acted on the spur of the moment. The decision itself had been premeditated but the timing of it was not-she was taken utterly by surprise by her own action.

She’d known for months that she had to rescue the baby: that they had to leave Bert and go in search of sanity.

She’d known it in the back of her mind since Ellen’s birth but she hadn’t been ready to face it squarely. Her feelings kept changing: she didn’t know what she wanted or what she needed.

At first there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support her sprouting apprehensive consternation. Instinct was all she had: an intuition of darkening evil. There was nothing to which she could have given testimony.

He didn’t seem to have changed; he was still the same big hearty slab-hard hoarse sportin’ man who’d swept her off her feet with his contradictory streaks of considerate courtliness and bizarre vulgarity.

Sometimes the excitement still overwhelmed her and in their fevered thrashings she’d find herself thinking Yes, yes, my God, more-I want more and she’d wonder how she ever could have dreamed of giving him up.

Yet her unease intensified. When she held the vulnerable baby in her arms the qualms turned into outright fear, even though at first she could not define it.

Then she found out about the drug business.

It wasn’t a big dramatic moment. She didn’t catch him with glass envelopes full of white powder. It was nothing more than the appearance of his name in a newspaper article. No accusation; just journalistic innuendo:

Another name that has surfaced in the DEA’s investigations is that of Manhattan building contractor Albert LaCasse. It is not yet clear what connection, if any, LaCasse may have to the unfolding story of drug-trafficking indictments.…

No more than that. But it was the last of many segments; when it fell into place the pattern came instantly clear.

Perhaps it always had been: sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t deliberately avoided finding out, like an Albert Speer who wanted to be left alone with his architecture, not caring to know anything about Hitler that could compromise his relationship with his own conscience.

Bert came home that evening to the condominium on Third Avenue and she was waiting for him in icy calm and after one look at her face he said, “I see you’ve been reading the Daily News.”

“It’s all true, isn’t it.”

“No.” He was hanging his coat in the hall closet. “Where are Philip and Marjorie?”

“She’s in with the baby. I told him to go to the movies. I thought we’d better talk in private.”

“I pity you, Madeleine, if you think you’re ever getting truth for your quarter. They’re not peddling truth. They’re peddling newspapers.”

“You’re right to pity me. I’ve been such a pathetic fool.”

He tossed his jacket on the couch and jerked his tie loose and strode toward the wet bar; then he changed his mind and came to her.

She was at the window by the balcony. Snow on the railing had melted a bit during the day, then refrozen; it had a hard sooty crust.

He didn’t make the mistake of reaching out for her. He stood at arm’s length and tried to stare her down. He said, “If they had any proof, don’t you think I’d have been indicted by now? Listen-it’s all distortions. I’m in this fight with the unions. They’re animals. They’ll spread any kind of lies to cut you down.”

He continued to stare at her; he endeavored to smile.

“That’s all it is-a couple of union buttons got paid to peddle a bunch of garbage and the reporters ate it up like the pigs they are. You understand?”

Her stubborn silence argued with him. He threw his hands high in a violent gesture of exasperation and now the hoarse voice thundered at her:

“It’s a bunch of fucking lies. I don’t deal dope. You ought to know that. Have you ever seen me dealing dope? Come on. These creeps, I expect this kind of shit from them-but what hurts, what really hurts all the way down, it hurts me to see you believing this swill. That’s what hurts. That’s what I hate the bastards for.”

She was afraid of the violence in him. And it was a good act, full of bombast, almost persuasive.

But she didn’t believe him.

It all fitted too well. She’d spent the past two hours remembering things and putting them together. The suitcases full of cash-for “union payoffs.” The twin-engine planes on the Fort Keene airstrip with their furtive Latin American pilots. The obsessive secrecy that always cloaked his expeditions out of town with Jack Sertic and one or more bodyguards. The guns everywhere-in the apartment, in his Lexington Avenue suite of offices, in the Fort Keene cabin. And the getaway preparations in the leather jacket he always kept in the front hall closet, its lining sewn with a passport in a phony name and God knows how many cut diamonds. She hadn’t been prying; she’d been going through the closet yesterday looking for things to donate to the Armory benefit and she’d felt the hard flat passport in the jacket and its presence had made her examine the jacket more closely.

Strange how careless he could be about things like that when he was so cautious about other aspects of his security. Once a week a man with a heavy briefcase came in to sweep the apartment for electronic bugs. The unlisted phone numbers and the combination of the burglar alarm were changed at irregular intervals. All their cars were equipped with break-in alarm systems.

Yet he’d fooled her. Perhaps, albeit, with her subconscious connivance.…

After that there was no more ducking the decision. If only for Ellen’s sake, the only thing left was separation and divorce.

Of course he wasn’t going to like that.

She didn’t see any method of approaching the subject by subtle misdirection; the only way to handle things with Bert was to put them out in the open. He wasn’t tuned in to subtleties. You couldn’t hint around; you couldn’t ease up on him. To get his attention you had to hit him over the head.

She made the mistake of confronting him with it the night they returned to the apartment from the Armory benefit where they had shared the head table with the mayor and four Broadway-Hollywood stars and two noted philanthropists and their wives. Bert was in an elevated mood when they came home: his eyes were aglitter with a kind of vengeful satisfaction, for there was in him (she had discovered) a streak of childlike vindictiveness that was rewarded whenever he was treated like an equal by the sort of people who reeked of old money and spoke with Ivy League establishment drawls. Bert carried himself with a forceful kind of panache but there was no disguising the fact that he was a child of New Jersey, descended from lower-class immigrant Corsicans; he never pretended to be otherwise than nouveau riche but still it pleased him to dine not only with celebrities but especially with brahmins and aristocrats.

Seizing the chance to catch him in a good mood she evaded his embrace in the bedroom. “Let’s talk.”

“Later.”

“No, Bert. Now.”

“Come on. Let’s fool around.”

“I want to take the baby away for a while.”

He tried to absorb that. “Aagh,” he said, dismissing it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I need a change.”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t dismiss it like that. We’ve got to talk about this.”

“Talk about what? You been smoking something or what?”

“We’re going away. The baby and I. We’re not staying here any more.”

He watched her very closely. He hardly seemed to be breathing.

She plunged on. “We’re just going away for a while, that’s all. Call it whatever you want. Say I want to get my act together. Say I need an ocean voyage. Call it a vacation. I need air.”

“Call it leaving me. Call it walking out on me. What the fuck are you talking about? You’re my wife. Ellen’s my daughter. What’s this you need a change, you need air, you want to go away for a while? What’s this shit? Who the fuck you think you’re talking to?”

“Please don’t make a bigger thing out of it than it is. I just need a little space to breathe for a while.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to unlace his shoes. He kicked them off and stared at them. Finally he looked up at her and she could see his disbelief and she realized her tentative approach had been cowardly. It would have been better to tell him the truth from the outset.

She tried to make up for it. “All right. Let’s have it out in the open. I’m leaving you.”

He looked a little punchdrunk. She’d caught him so badly off balance she nearly felt sorry for him.

She pounded it home: “She’s not going to grow up in a dope dealer’s home. My daughter’s not going to live in that environment. I can’t allow that. I’m taking her away from here.”

A deep breath: don’t run out of gas now. Keep going.

Finish it. “I’m sorry, Bert. You should have been content with the construction business. I can’t go on living with the kind of thing you’ve turned into. I can’t expose my daughter to that.”

He stared at her, his face closing up as she spoke-and then his continuing silence made her break out in a cold sweat.

She felt a growing desperation. “We can do this like civilized people or we can do it the hard way, you know. If that’s what you want I’ll have to get a lawyer and believe me I’ll get the nastiest bastard I can find. I don’t imagine any court in the world would grant custody of a baby girl to a dope peddler.”

She gathered up her handbag and the wrap she’d been wearing; still in evening clothes, stalking on high heels, she went toward the door. “We’re going now. I’ll let you know where to send our things.”

“Like hell you will.”

It wasn’t his words; it was the low even rasp of his voice that stopped her.

He said to her back, “Just stay put. I need some time to think about this.”

“Fine. Think about it all you want. I’ll let you know where you can reach me when you want to talk about it.”

“You want me to sleep in the other room tonight? Fine. All right. But nobody’s leaving right now.”

She turned to face him. “You can stop me from taking her tonight, of course. You’re strong enough. But I’ll just get a court order. Is that what I have to do?”

He shook his head-more in bafflement than in visible anger. “No divorce. No custody. That’s all. Okay? Understand?”

“You’re having some kind of Corsican dream. Let’s talk about reality.”

“I’ll tell you reality. Reality is you don’t take my daughter away from me. Reality is you don’t walk all over me in a divorce court. You don’t like it here any more? I’m sorry about that. But you made a bargain. You took my name, you took my money.”

“You can have them both back. I don’t need your money.”

“Yeah. How noble. Okay. Reality, now, reality is you don’t walk out on Albert LaCasse. And Ellen stays with her daddy.”

“Jesus, haven’t you heard a word I said?”

“Sure I heard you. Let’s discuss one simple fact.” He’d gone glacial; his enunciation became angrily precise:

“You file against me, you try to take Ellen away, anything at all along those lines, the whole thing comes to an end for you right then and right there.”

She gaped at him. “Are you actually threatening to kill me?”

“Kill you? What the fuck am I now, some kind of murderer? Christ almighty. Who said anything about killing anybody?” The big shoulders lifted; the expressive hands gesticulated, then subsided. He had control of his alarm now.

He descended into dark weary sadness. It was only partly an act, an aspect of his voluble Corsican theatricality; it was also a manifestation of genuine pain and loss. He brooded; he scowled; he searched for thoughts he could express.

And finally without heat he said: “I don’t think you have any idea how many subsidiaries I run, how many people owe me consideration.”

He looked up. She was watching him, puzzled, not able to anticipate where this might be leading.

“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.

The subway was the best bet at this hour. There was an entrance just a block uptown on Lexington. She’d already decided that; she knew precisely where she’d go with the baby-down the Lexington Avenue line to Grand Central Station, change for the crosstown shuttle, get off at Eighth Avenue, walk two blocks to a car rental agency and hope they had something immediately available. If not, walk straight down the street into the Port Authority bus terminal and catch a bus to any town across the river in Jersey where they rented cars.

Speed was the trick. Get out of Manhattan; get into a car. After that there’d be time to breathe, time to find an open supermarket, time to study maps. But first she had to get the baby out of this apartment.

She carried Ellen to the front hall closet. The bottle wasn’t empty but the baby must have sensed her distress. Probably felt the bashing of her heartbeat. Ellen spurned the nipple and began to cry.

She put the bottle down on the hall table, hooked her handbag over her wrist and reached into the closet: folded the leather jacket over her forearm and picked up the suitcase, cradling the wailing baby in one arm, and turned to struggle with the deadbolt on the front door.

A torrent of adrenaline slammed through her; her palsied hand was barely able to turn the knob.

When Philip Quirini cleared his throat she nearly dropped the baby.

Perhaps it was the tone of the baby’s yelling; perhaps something else. Whatever it had been, she was caught. The Quirinis, husband and wife, came down the hall with carefully expressionless faces, their eyes taking in everything: the suitcase, the baby, the half-open apartment door.

Philip Quirini said very politely, “Let me give you a hand with that suitcase, Mrs. LaCasse.”

Marjorie contrived a sliver of a smile. “I’ll take the baby for you now.”

He had his hand on the edge of the door, blocking her exit; Marjorie was reaching for Ellen. Over the infant’s howls Marjorie said, “The baby’s not supposed to go out in this weather”-what weather? It was a normal day for early summer-and she saw Marjorie’s glance fall upon the suitcase again and saw the determined set of Marjorie’s jaw under the polite cool subservient smile and she knew it was no good: she couldn’t get away with the baby but neither could she turn back now because within two minutes Bert would be told what she’d tried to do and her next stop, and last one, would be commitment to that rubber room.

No choice. None at all.

She surrendered the baby. “Tell my husband I’ll be away for a few days. Tell him not to worry.” And picked up the suitcase and took it with the jacket through the door. They didn’t move to stop her. That wasn’t included in their instructions. They only smiled and she watched the door swing shut, cutting off her view of the baby.

She could still hear Ellen’s yowling when she crossed the vestibule and put her key in the switch that summoned the elevator. The sound dwindled as the baby was carried away toward the nursery.

Would they awaken Bert right away?

Probably.

Chances were she only had a minute or two to get away. Where was the damned elevator?

What else could I have done? There must have been something. Can I go back now and get her? Isn’t there some way?

She scrambled feverishly amid the labyrinth of visions. But all of them were dead ends.

She heard the elevator mechanism. At least it was moving. But where was the car?

Back in the apartment she thought she heard a door slam.

My God. Come on!

Nothing to do but run for it. Hide. Set up a nest somewhere safe. Then come back when he’s no longer expecting it and take the baby away from him.

Footsteps in the apartment. Pounding hard on the carpet. Coming forward. Bert’s stride.

The car arrived; the doors slid open. She kicked the suitcase into the elevator, swung inside, jabbed her key into the slot.

The doors were closing and she just had a glimpse of Bert as he came plunging out of the apartment. He was stretching forward, trying to claw at the closing doors, but they came together before his hand reached them.

The car lurched and began to slide downward.

She wept and wept and wept.