Speak of the Devil

11

NIGHTMARE WAS ONE BALLSY PIECE OF WORK. MAYBE BRILLIANT. Maybe naively stupid. Reckless, to be sure. Contemptuous of authority. An attention hound. Insecure. Angry. Vainglorious. Deluded. And he liked to dress up in nuns’ clothing.

Phyllis was right: could be anyone.

There are several fairly standard ways of handling a money drop. Often the person making the demand will designate a somewhat remote area where he (it’s usually a he) can get a decent sense of who’s lurking nearby. In the case of kidnapping, the kidnapper is holding the plumb card. So long as the hostage is still being held, no one is going to swoop down on the kidnapper in the middle of the pickup.

But in this case, Nightmare’s hostage wasn’t a single frightened person who was going to be released on a random street corner once the money had been paid and the kidnapper had safely blended back into the woodwork. It was the entire city. Or if it was one person, it was New York City Mayor Martin Leavitt. Whichever way you wanted to look at it, Nightmare held all the cards. And like I said, the way he was playing them was ballsy, brilliant, stupid and reckless all at once.

He wanted the hand-off to be done at the Cloisters Museum in the middle of a crowded holiday weekend.

In the coat-check room.

See? Ballsy.

“WHAT AN IDIOT,” MARGO SAID. “YOU GRAB HIM RIGHT THERE. OR you follow him and grab him later. He’s putting himself right in your hands.”

And I was putting a calamari right in my mouth. It was a tad overcooked-when I chewed, it chewed back. Calamari is tricky that way. It either melts in your mouth or it refuses to go down without a struggle. I had a pilsner glass of Carlsberg Elephant at hand to help subdue the calamari. Across the small table, Margo was confronting a spinach salad of Olympian proportions. She seemed uncertain where to start.

Margo and I were in the back room of Miss Elle’s Homesick Bar and Grill on West Seventy-ninth Street. Except Miss Elle had recently sold the place to a mystery writer named Dorian, and now the sign out front said Dorian’s. But it still looked like Miss Elle’s, the food still tasted like Miss Elle’s, and the hurly-burly crowd of regulars at the small bar in the front were Miss Elle’s regulars. So what’s in a name? It was still a duck.

Margo was reminding me of Tinker Bell today, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. Technically speaking, there’s nothing remotely Tinker Bellish about her.

“Can’t do it,” I said to her. “His note made it clear that if anyone tries to grab him at the museum, or if he’s picked up later, we’ll be seeing another bloody mess.”

“If you nab him, how can he do anything?”

“For starters, he could rig himself with explosives. We know he has the means. He could blow. But even if it’s not that, we have to worry about another accomplice.”

“You mean you can’t pick him up because he might have instructed someone that if you do, they should wreak havoc again somewhere else in the city. Preferably where there are big crowds.”

Margo was wearing a sort of leafy green blouse. Maybe that’s why I was thinking of Tinker Bell. But maybe not.

“Exactly. The guy has a built-in insurance policy.”

“But that’s ridiculous. If you follow that line of logic, then you’re talking about a person with total immunity. He could walk around the city with a sandwich board announcing, ‘I’m the crazed killer! But nobody touch me or else!’ ”

“That’s funny,” I said.

“What’s so funny about it? It’s horrible.”

“No. That you said sandwich board. Phyllis mentioned a sandwich board earlier.”

“A riot.”

“Two mentions of sandwich boards in one afternoon? And they went out of common use before you or I were even born.”

“Cosmic.”

“Don’t be sarcastic, Mo. You go from pretty to gorgon.”

“That’s nice. You’re calling me a gorgon.”

“Figure of speech.”

“Not really.”

“In a way.”

“Then so is ‘sandwich board.’ ”

I picked up my Elephant. “Are we entering into an argument?”

“If we are, it would be one our silliest.”

“What say we skip it? You are so far from a gorgon that the very idea makes me choke up with laughter.”

Margo buried her fork deep within her spinach. “You look pretty calm to me.”

The drop-off was to take place the following day. Saturday. Two o’clock, when the museum would be gagged with people. The mayor was being forced to play the tie game again. This time he was supposed to wear a green one. The note that had been fetched from the horizontal cooler at the Gristedes said that if Mayor Leavitt was ready to agree to the conditions of the rendezvous at the museum, he was to make an appearance on the six o’clock local news wearing a green tie. He was further instructed to include the word “Wisconsin” in his appearance.

We got the check. Margo had managed to eat most of her spinach salad. She had formed what remained into a little pyramid in the center of her plate. “Why Wisconsin?” she asked as I was calculating the tip.

“Who knows? Maybe the guy is telling us where he was born. All we’ve got to do is question every person in the five boroughs who was born in Wisconsin. Or maybe it’s for no good reason at all. The tie should be enough. It could just be part of the guy’s game. Jerking Leavitt around.”

The waitress came over and I handed her the check and the cash.

Margo asked, “Did you leave a good tip?”

The waitress was still standing at the table. I looked up at her. “Maybe you could answer that for me.”

The waitress blushed.

Margo blushed, too. “Oops.”

“You need to have your timing adjusted, sweetie,” I said.

The waitress was flipping through the bills. “This looks fine. Thanks.”

She left. Margo reached across the table and finished the last small sip of my beer. “That just popped out. Sorry.”

“You can trust me. I’m a big tipper.”

“I know you are. Sorry. So anyway. Wisconsin. How’s Leavitt going to make a sound bite around the word ‘Wisconsin’?”

“I’m sure he’s got his best and brightest working on it. He told me that he’s going to award a commendation to Leonard Cox this afternoon at around four-thirty. He’ll get media coverage for sure.”

“Do you think this guy will actually do something if he doesn’t hear ‘Wisconsin’?”

“Probably not, that’s the thing. He’s just playing Leavitt’s nerves like a harp.”

Margo frowned. “Ugly imagery.”

She skidded her chair back from the table and stood up. Beneath the leafy green blouse, she was wearing a simple black skirt. Beneath the skirt were Margo’s pale legs, poked into a pair of calf-high brown leather boots. As I rose from the table she trained her eyes on me and she pressed her palms against her hips, running her hands down along them several times as I rose from the table.

Pretty imagery.