The Snatch

5

Martinetti was sitting alone on the terrace, at a wrought-iron table under a huge fringed umbrella. I could see him as I came up the path from the front gate, but instead of cutting across the lawn on the circular stepping stones leading to the terrace from an opening in the low retaining wall, I went peremptorily to the front door and rang the bell.

The thin dark-haired maid-Cassy-let me in and put my hat on the same hall table and escorted me wordlessly through the huge living room and through a sliding glass door at the left of the bay window. I did not see any sign of Karyn Martinetti or Proxmire, the secretary. The living room was dark and silent.

There was a white cloth spread over the table at which Martinetti sat, and on it was a silver coffee service and a crystal decanter of what looked like brandy. The cup in front of him was half full, and his face was flushed lightly. The gray eyes were sunken in discolored pouches, and had a haunted look to them; no magnetism on this day.

He turned the haunted eyes on me as I came out onto the terrace and put his chin down a half-point in greeting. I sat in the chair on his right. He said, hollowly, to the maid, “Bring another cup, would you please, Cassy?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and went away.

We sat there in silence for a time, looking out over the rippling blue-green water in the pool, to the drive and a high green bordering hedge beyond it. It was warm and quiet, and you could hear sparrows and fat-breasted robins chattering in the trees. I wanted a cigarette so badly that the thought of one made saliva flow hotly in my mouth.

I said finally, “No word yet, Mr. Martinetti?” but it was a rhetorical question. I could tell just by looking at him that there had been none.

He shook his head and put the coffee cup to his mouth and drank deeply from it with his eyes closed. A shudder passed through him, brief and violent, and then he put the cup down very carefully with hands that were steady only by an effort of will.

The maid came back with a china cup on a small silver tray and put the cup down in front of me and poured coffee from the silver service. Then she refilled Martinetti’s cup and went away again. I watched him add a couple of fingers from the decanter, and poured milk and stirred sugar into my own coffee.

I said quietly, “You ought to get some sleep, Mr. Martinetti. I can watch the phone for you.”

“No, I’m all right,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“Whatever you say.”

He drank from his cup again. I hoped he would not get drunk; in this sort of situation the clearer the thinking the better off everything was going to be. But he looked as if he could handle the liquor well enough, and I thought better of saying anything to him about it. If Gary Martinetti had been my son, maybe I would have felt like getting a little tight, too.

There was not much we could say to one another, and we sat and listened to the morning sounds. I drank coffee and chewed toothpicks and tried not to think about anything at all. An hour passed, and I knew I was not going to make it. My nerves were like the sparking ends of live wires. I kept telling myself to remember the cough, to remember my uncle who had died wasted of cancer, but I wasn’t coughing now and my lungs felt fine and it just wasn’t any goddamned use, not with the tension building inexorably with each passing second.

I excused myself and went along the lawn to the path and out to where I had left my car. In the glove compartment I found three packages of cigarettes that I had known were there all along. I got one of them out and tore it open and shook out a cylinder and lit it and breathed in the smoke like it was ambrosia. I closed my eyes and leaned against the side of the car, and there was a weak feeling of completion in the pit of my stomach, the kind of feeling you have after a sexual orgasm. I was not coughing, and the barrier was back up in my mind; I could not even tell myself what a weak damned fool I was.

I put the opened package and another one in my coat pocket and walked back across the footbridge, through the gate. As I approached the terrace, I saw that Karyn Martinetti had come out and was sitting next to her husband at the table. She still had that little-girl-lost expression in her eyes, but there was some color in her cheeks and she’d put on a touch of coral lipstick. The blond hair was pulled back severely into a ponytail and tied with a black velvet ribbon, and she was dressed in a thin white sweater and a wrap-around skirt and white tennis shoes.

She tried a smile for me as I sat down, but it was weak and painful for her and she put it away almost immediately.

I said, “Good morning, Mrs. Martinetti. How are you feeling?”

“Oh, lovely,” she answered in a dull voice. “I can’t remember when I’ve ever felt as lovely as I do at this very moment.”

“Karyn, for God’s sake!” Martinetti snapped at her.

She brought her arms up and hugged herself as if she was suddenly chilled. “I’m sorry,” she said very softly.

“I’m sorry.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down?” Martinetti said. “You aren’t helping us or yourself being down here.”

“I don’t want to be alone, Lou.”

“Cassy will stay with you.”

“I want to stay here.”

He moistened his lips. “All right, then.”

And the three of us sat, waiting. The sun climbed perpendicular in the pale blue autumn sky, and then started its slow and repetitive descent toward the western horizon. Cassy came out with a plate of sandwiches and some chilled raw vegetables, but none of us seemed to be very hungry. I smoked three more cigarettes, carefully, like a junior high school kid locked in the bathroom, and nothing happened in my chest. The tension was still strong in the air, growing stronger, but I could handle it now; I had my crutch back.

Shortly past one the silver MG roadster I had seen the day before pulled across the wooden bridge into the drive and Dean Proxmire got out. He came hurrying across the lawn and onto the terrace, harried and pale and somber. His eyes, when they touched Karyn Martinetti’s face, held a deep concern-and something else that I could not quite read.

Martinetti said, “Did you take care of things at the office?”

“Yes. Any news yet?”

“Nothing.”

“Christ, what’s taking him so long?”

“I wish to God I knew.”

Proxmire sank into the fourth chair at the table, looked at Karyn Martinetti again, looked at the back of his hands. He said softly, bitterly, “The bastard. The lousy bastard.”

More silence. Five minutes passed. And then, suddenly, Martinetti scraped his chair back and got to his feet. He lifted the near-empty decanter off the table. “I’m going into the study,” he said. He looked at me. “Are you coming?

I said, “All right,” and stood up.

“Dean?”

“If you don’t mind, I’ll stay here with Karyn,” Proxmire said.

“Why should I mind?” Martinetti said.

They looked at one another steadily, and something indefinable passed between them. I wondered what kind of relationships lay below the proper surface in this nice Hillsborough house-but it wasn’t any of my business. I had enough to worry about.

Martinetti turned on his heel and I followed him through the living room and down the side hallway and through the ornate double doors into his study. He went over to the bar and got a glass from behind it and took that and the decanter to his desk. I sat on the couch facing him. He said, “Help yourself if you want a drink,” and poured his glass three-quarters full.

The silence deepened after a time, seeming to gain volume, so that it was like a screaming cacophony of sound just beyond the range of hearing. I developed a headache from listening to it, from the tension of waiting. I made a couple of attempts at conversation, but Martinetti was not having any. He sat there drinking and staring at a point high on the wall above his stereo components, moving just a little every now and then to ease a cramped muscle. He did not look at me at all.

I got up a couple of times and prowled the room, looking at the books on the shelves, the hammered-copper curios, the stereo unit. The books were stuffy English classics and modern romances and biographical studies, the records were fugues, Chopin and Bartok and Shostakovich, mood and dinner music-but no jazz; none of it much interested me. I went through a half-dozen more cigarettes, and there was a rasping in my chest now and I knew that the next one would bring on the coughing. I could hear Erika’s voice saying over and over in my mind, When are you going to grow up? Do you think you’ve got the body of a teenager? When are you going to grow up?

* * * *

The call came at nine minutes past four.

The sound of the bell seemed to explode in the strained, deafening hush of the room. Martinetti came half out of his chair in a convulsive movement, freezing there, his eyes bulging toward the phone, his hands gripping the edge of the desk. I got on my feet and swallowed against a dryness in my throat.

Martinetti gave a kind of shiver, as if to regenerate mobility, and then caught up the receiver with his right hand. He said, “Hello?” in a hoarse whispering voice.

He did not say anything else for more than a minute. He held the instrument pressed tightly to his ear, the hand white and rigid around it, his face a mask of intense concentration as he listened. Finally he said, “Yes, I understand,” paused, said, “Please, I’m doing just as you want, don’t hurt my-”

His mouth clamped shut, and the hand holding the receiver dropped slowly to his side. After a moment he reached out and placed the handset in its cradle and sank back down in his chair. He put his head in his hands.

I went up to the desk and saw that his shoulders were trembling almost imperceptibly, as if he might be silently weeping. I gave him thirty seconds, and then I said softly, “Mr. Martinetti.”

His head jerked up, and he looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. There was a grayness to the taut skin across his cheekbones, but his eyes were dry.

“Is anything wrong?” I asked him. “The call-?”

“No, no,” he said, and took a deep shuddering breath. “I … it’s just that I … I feel drained, purged, after all that waiting. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

There was a sharp rapping on the entrance doors, and one of them swung open and Proxmire came quickly into the study. Karyn Martinetti was behind him, her face the color of dirty snow. Proxmire said, “We heard the telephone. Was that-?”

Martinetti said, “Yes.”

“What did he say? Is Gary all right?”

“He’s all right.”

“Well, what did he say?”

Martinetti looked at him dully.

“Damn it, man, did he give you instructions for delivering the ransom money?” Proxmire demanded.

Martinetti seemed not to notice. “Yes.”

I said, “When will it be?”

“Tonight.”

“What time?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Where?”

“There’s a dirt road leading off Old Southbridge Road, up in the hills back of San Bruno,” Martinetti said woodenly. “You’re to drive in there exactly one mile. You’ll leave your car in a turnaround there and walk down the embankment at the left side of the road until you reach a flat sandstone rock. You’ll put the money on top of the rock and return to your car. Then you’ll turn the car around and go back the way you came.”

I thought it over. “It sounds kind of isolated. He’d be leaving himself wide open to a trap, if you’d played it the other way and called the police.”

“Not really,” Proxmire said. “I know that area, and there’s another road at the bottom of the embankment. If he waits down there, there are a dozen streets he can slip into once he has the money.”

I nodded, and said to Martinetti, “Was there anything else?”

“A warning,” he answered softly. “No police, and no tricks. If he’s picked up, and doesn’t return to a certain place at a certain time, there is someone with the boy who has instructions to …” He broke off, and dry-washed his face savagely with both hands. “When he has the money, we’ll get a call telling us where to find Gary. That’s all.”

I took a breath. “Have you got a map of the drop area?”

“I think there’s one in the hall table.”

“I’ll get it,” Proxmire said. He went to where Karyn Martinetti was standing with both hands hooked onto the couch in front of the fireplace, took her arm, and led her out of the room.

Martinetti got up and took the decanter over to the alcove. He poured a small one into his glass, drank it off, shuddered, and put the decanter away behind the bar. He said, “I’ve had enough of that.”

I did not say anything, but I thought that he was probably right.

Proxmire came back alone, with a map of the San Francisco Peninsula. I spread it open on Martinetti’s desk. He pointed out the area, and the spot of the drop as near as he could tell it by scale. I familiarized myself with it, and with the route I would take to get there, and then folded the map and put it into my coat pocket.

It was about the kind of thing I had expected: simple enough, well planned, not much margin for error. Except for a few minutes alone in the darkness with three hundred thousand dollars, it would be a cakewalk for me; as long as nothing went wrong, it did not seem to be worth anywhere near the fifteen hundred dollars I was getting for it.

* * * *