The Fugitive Pigeon

Chapter 10

At the tollbooths to the George Washington Bridge, Miss Althea stuck her head out the window and screamed, “Help! They’re kidnaping me!”

The toll taker in his uniform looked blankly at her.

“They’re kidnaping me!” she insisted.

The toll taker made a disgusted face, to show what he thought of modern kids, out running around with no sense of values, making noisy senseless jokes. He took the half-dollar from Chloe, and we rolled on past there.

“He’s in the plot, too,” I said.

“Oh, shut up,” she said. She flounced back in the seat, folded her arms, and glared furiously at the back of Chloe’s head.

We had taken an extremely roundabout way of returning to New York, leaving Staten Island by the Outerbridge Crossing and driving up past the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and all the way up to the George Washington Bridge, just in case the car had been seen by anyone who could describe it to the organization’s underlings, who were surely by now all in hot pursuit of us and our hostage.

As to the hostage, we were keeping her because we felt safer with her to hide behind. It seemed unlikely any organization tough would gun down the daughter of Farmer Agricola in order to get at an unimportant nephew like me.

On the trip up the Jersey coast, after filling Artie and Chloe in on the details of what had happened to me since last night — and that it had all occurred in less than sixteen hours, including time out for sleep on Artie’s bedroom floor, was itself as astonishing as anything else — I made a long and unsuccessful attempt to explain to Miss Althea Agricola just who and what her father had been and why I had gone out to the farm to see him. But she refused to believe any of it, and nothing I said would shake her firmly seated ignorance.

At first it had seemed incredible that she could have remained unaware of her father’s true self, but in the course of her denials, facts about her life came out which helped to explain it. In the first place, her mother had died when Miss Althea was still an infant, so Farmer Agricola was her only parent. In the second place, she had spent practically all of her life in boarding schools, and was only rarely at home on the Staten Island farm. Summers had been spent with other relatives in various parts of the world. She was only at home now because there was a two-week hiatus between the end of her summer visit to an uncle and aunt in Southern California and the beginning of the fall semester at the girls’ college in Connecticut at which she would be a junior this year.

So if her father told her he was a farmer, why shouldn’t she believe him? And if he told her he had his money invested in stocks and real estate that gave him a good high return, what was wrong with that? And if he told her Clarence wasn’t a bodyguard but was hired to run the farm, he was hardly any more improbable a foreman than some she’d seen on television or in the movies. And if men like the two in the black car, who stopped by occasionally to confer in private with her father, were announced as either old friends or business associates, why should she disbelieve?

I know it isn’t exactly the same thing, but I myself didn’t really know what Uncle Al did for a living till I was twenty-two years old, and then I only found out because he got me a job at the bar, which by all rights I should have been in Canarsie opening instead of riding across the George Washington Bridge with a gun in my hand, a hostage in my hair, and — for all I knew — a price on my head.

Approaching the New York side of the bridge now, Chloe spoke up for nearly the first time, saying, “Where to?”

Where to? I didn’t really know. “Mr. Gross,” I said. “I guess I have to find Mr. Gross.”

“But which way do I go?” Chloe wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how to find Mr. Gross.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Chloe said. “The end of the bridge is coming up. Do I take the Henry Hudson Parkway or do I take the local streets? See the signs?”

I saw the signs, but I didn’t really know what to tell her. Artie took the decision out of my hands, saying, “We’ll want to go downtown anyway. Take the Parkway.”

“Fine,” said Chloe. She changed lanes, terrifying an orange Volkswagen, and we left the bridge.

Artie turned in the seat to say to me, “About Mr. Gross I can’t help you. From what you say, from what I heard those guys say, he’s got to be higher up in the rackets than Agricola was, and Agricola was the highest up I ever even heard of.”

Miss Althea said, “Why don’t you just give up? It isn’t going to do you any good. I don’t believe you and I won’t believe you, so why don’t you stop?”

“Shut up,” I asked, “I’ve got to think.”

“How about your Uncle Al?” Artie suggested.

“What about him? I tried to get him to help me before, and he betrayed me instead.”

“You didn’t have a gun last time,” Artie pointed out.

“Hmmm,” I said.

“You’re all insane,” Miss Althea said. “Insane.”

“All right,” I said. “Back to Uncle Al.”