The Snatch

6

Time crawled like a fat gray slug.

Seconds became lifetimes, and minutes became miniature eternities. The waiting before had been bad, but this was something else again. You could feel the pressure building, building, like a tangible entity through the dark and silent house.

Martinetti had professed a desire to be alone, and Proxmire and I had gone out to sit in the living room with Karyn Martinetti. It was a nice living room-a copper-hooded fireplace similar in styling but somewhat larger than the one in the study, some good stark seascapes of the cypress-dotted coastline between Monterey and Big Sur, a low rock planter wall that right-angled into the room between the bay window and the fireplace and had some green vines twisting down along the stones almost to the floor-but the air in there seemed stagnant, as if it had been closed up for a very long time. I had to breathe through my mouth after a while. My headache gained magnitude to where the dull pain had a lancing rhythm, like the muted throb of a two-cycle engine.

Cassy came with coffee and more sandwiches. I got two cups of the strong black liquid down, but the ham-on-whole-wheat seemed to stick in a glutinous mass in my throat. Proxmire and Karyn Martinetti neither ate nor drank anything; they were sitting on the couch, at opposite ends, like two sculpted bookends holding up nothing at all.

The door chimes sounded just past six, and Proxmire was on his feet and moving with long strides into the entrance hall before the echo of them faded into silence. From where I was sitting I could look into the hall, and I saw him open the door and admit Allan Channing.

Channing, dressed as he had been that morning, was carrying a brown leather suitcase in his right hand. It looked very heavy. He glanced into the living room and saw me, but he made no acknowledgment. He told Proxmire that Martinetti was waiting for him, and the two of them disappeared into the side hall.

A couple of minutes passed, and Proxmire came back and sat down stoically and watched Karyn Martinetti out of half-lidded eyes. I tried another cigarette, and the coughing started, and I ground it out immediately. My chest felt as if a steel band were being tightened around it, suffocating me. The weight of this whole thing was beginning to settle squarely on my shoulders now; the others were assuming passive roles. If anything went wrong tonight …

Well, all right, I told myself. All you have to do is follow the instructions. No games and no heroics; hell, you’re not even inclined that way. That’s simple enough, isn’t it?

I decided I needed some fresh air. I went out onto the terrace and walked over to the outdoor bar. It was constructed of stone, with a slant-backed wooden roof; four leather-topped stools were arranged before it. I sat on one of them, facing toward the house and pool.

It was full dark now, and the night air held the clean, mild bite of autumn frost. The stars seemed cold and synthetic in the ebon sky. There was a yellow-gold half moon, like a canted, halved orange slice, sitting directly overhead; the edges of its curvature were of a slightly darker coloration, rindlike. It shone on the water in the swimming pool in a long, slender, golden streamer.

I felt better, sitting out there. The drapes were pulled closed over the bay window, and I could not see inside; I thought that was just as well. From the direction of the creek running across the rear of the Martinetti property, there was the commingled sound of crickets and night birds singing full-throated and yet very soft, without worry and without sadness.

The music they made seemed to have a deep lure for me, like that haunting oboe melody in Hamlin town, and I left the outdoor bar and walked to the creek across the thick dew-scented grass. I reached the bank and the heavy shadows cast by the tall, staid eucalyptus, and began to walk toward the rock garden at the far end of the grounds.

The creek bed was rocky and littered with branches and leaves and silt. A thin, tired stream meandered across the stones in the exact center, but when the winter rains came, the creek would be swollen and rushing with muddy brown run-off water. The banks were irregular and not at all steep, and I thought to hell with it and climbed down to give the frail and weary stream some company for a short while.

I walked slowly, listening to the night music, smelling the dampness of the earth and of green things growing fresh and strong. The cold air felt very good in my lungs, and I took long swallows of it and thought about nothing at all.

I drew parallel with the rock garden, and the stunted shapes of the shrubs and plants were silky black shadows against the lighter color of the sky. I reached the high redwood boundary fence and went past it fifteen yards or so, and there was a shelf at the bole of one of the slender eucalyptus covered with dry leaves and dark green Spanish moss. I sat down on that, in the deep shadow of the tree, and looked into the darkness beyond the opposite bank, where thick undergrowth obliterated the rear grounds of another home. The orange-slice moon was visible between the branches of the trees overhead.

I had been there about five minutes, sitting motionless on the natural bank chair, when I heard the sound of footfalls shuffling through the foliage at the base of the redwood fence, coming around it. There was silence for the space of several heartbeats, and then voices, clear and distinct, came drifting to me on the scented night air.

“Oh God, Dean, hold me, just hold me!”

“Easy, honey, easy now.”

“I just couldn’t stand it another minute in there!”

“I know, I know.”

Proxmire and Karyn Martinetti. I turned my head without moving my body, and I could see them standing back against the fence, two dark forms blended together, embracing. I held my breath, listening, not wanting to listen at all.

Several seconds passed before they parted, but they remained standing very close together. Karyn Martinetti’s voice said fervently, “Dean, tell me everything is going to be all right. Tell me Gary will come home safely.”

“He will, honey, he will.”

“I’m so afraid!”

“Don’t let yourself be.”

“If … if anything happens to him, I don’t know what I’ll do!”

“Shh, now, nothing is going to happen to him.”

“I wish I could believe that!”

“You can believe it, you have to believe it.”

“God, oh God, why did this nightmare have to happen? Everything seemed to be perfect for us, you and Gary and me. I could have left Lou just as we planned, and gone to Massillon to my parents and let a lawyer handle the whole matter …”

“It can still work out that way.”

“No, no, don’t you see? I always thought Lou was indifferent where Gary was concerned, that he didn’t really care about him at all. But I was wrong, Dean, because he’s about to pay three hundred thousand dollars to get him back. I didn’t think he would, but I thank the Lord that he is, and I can’t hate him any more.”

“No, you can’t hate him, but you can’t go on living with him either, Karyn.”

“I know that. But he won’t just let me leave with Gary now. He’ll fight me for custody, if only because he’s made an investment and he hates to lose on any kind of investment. That’s the way he is, Dean, I know!”

“If he wants a court battle, we’ll give him one.”

“Suppose he charges me with adultery?”

“He can’t prove anything.”

“But he knows. Isn’t that enough?”

“In a court of law, no.”

“The scandal would be sufficient to give him custody of Gary, and I couldn’t bear that!”

“Not if we fought it long and hard enough.”

“We don’t have the money for that kind of battle.”

“There are ways of getting money.”

“How?”

“You let me worry about that.”

The shadows blended together again.

“Oh, darling, I love you so very much!”

Soft, liquid sounds-the sounds of a woman weeping. I felt suddenly very cold, sitting there, embarrassed for them and more embarrassed for myself. There could not have been a worse time for me to overhear a conversation like that; it made this whole damned affair that much more painful, my own position that much more awkward. I felt a little sorry for Martinetti, but I felt a whole lot sorrier for his son.

The shapes divided again, after a couple of minutes, and Proxmire’s voice said, “We’d better be getting back, honey, before we’re missed. Are you all right now?”

“Yes.”

“Everything will work out, believe me. Try to be brave.”

“I’ll try.”

I listened to their footfalls moving away, not watching them, not moving. I gave them five minutes to get back inside the house, and then I got up slowly and walked back along the creek bed to a spot opposite the outdoor bar. I climbed up the bank and went across the grass and onto the terrace and inside through the sliding glass door at the side of the bay window.

There was no one in the living room; maybe she’d gone upstairs to lie down, and he’d gone with her. It was just as well, because I did not want to have to look at either of them. I sat down on the couch and poured some cold coffee into my cup and balanced the saucer on my knee. My wristwatch said that it was a quarter past seven. I had two hours yet; it was going to be more like two days. I wanted nothing so much as I wanted to be finished with this whole thing.

A half-hour went by, dragging chains. I got up finally and stepped to where a console color television sat at an angle against the near wall, and turned it on just to have some sound, some movement. When Proxmire put in an appearance ten minutes later, I was watching a guy in an astronaut suit exhibit the patience of Job with a five-year-old kid who kept demanding another cartoon.

He looked at me as if I were committing an unnatural sin. “For Christ’s sake, do you have to have that thing on now?”

“Would you rather I locked myself in the coat closet until it’s time to leave?”

“Listen, you don’t have to get snotty.”

“No,” I said, “I guess I don’t.”

“We’re all on edge around here, you know,” he said, and went over on the other side of the planter wall and stared at the empty fireplace.

Another half-hour crawled away, and then it was eight-thirty. I lit a cigarette and coughed my way through it and went outside again for more air. I walked around. I sat by the pool. I came back into the living room and sat on the couch some more. Nine o’clock.

I gave it another five minutes; then I went out through the entrance hall and down the side hallway and knocked on the study doors. Martinetti’s voice said to come in, and I opened one of the doors and walked inside.

Martinetti was standing at the bar, but not drinking, and Channing was sitting on the couch; they looked like a couple of old, old men in the pale light from the lamp on the desk-perhaps for different reasons. The suitcase was on the desk, too.

I said, “I think it’s about time I was going.”

Martinetti nodded and rubbed wearily at his haunted eyes. “I was going to give you another ten minutes, but maybe it’s better if you leave a little early.”

“Maybe so.” I had trouble meeting his gaze, after what I had overheard by the creek.

“You know exactly what you are supposed to do?”

I said I knew.

He nodded again. “I’m very grateful to you,” he said. “For being here today and for doing this tonight.”

“Sure,” I said.

Martinetti took the suitcase off the desk and started toward the door. Channing got to his feet wordlessly, and we followed Martinetti out into the entrance hall. Proxmire was there, and when we stepped outside he came tagging along. We looked like a single file of grim-visaged bank examiners walking along the gravel path and through the gate and across the footbridge.

There was a street lamp about ten feet in back of my car, and it cast a pool of pale amber light on the dark, silent street. I got inside the car, and Martinetti handed me the case and I put it on the seat beside me.

He said, “Luck.”

I tried a little smile, and nodded, and made a sign with my thumb and forefinger. He stepped back and I got the car going.

When I reached the corner, I looked up at my rear-view mirror. They were all standing there on the edge of the amber pool of light, three black silhouettes against the illumination, watching me. Then I turned the corner and they were gone, and I was alone.

* * * *

7

I drove out of Hillsborough and onto El Camino Real, north. I drove slowly, both hands on the wheel, concentrating on the pavement sweeping by beneath the car’s headlights and letting the rest of my mind lie fallow.

Traffic was heavy, as it has a tendency to be in the evenings, through Burlingame and Millbrae; when I reached San Bruno, it thinned out considerably and I could make a little better time. At Sneath Lane, I turned left and followed it past the Golden Gate National Cemetery and across Junipero Serra Boulevard, and then across Skyline, and finally into the hills well south of Riverside Park.

Skyline seemed to be the dividing line between a bright, cold, clear sky and the restless tendrils of blanketing fog that drifted in above Pacifica from the ocean. The fog was thick and wet in the hills, and gave an eerie, disembodied quality to the lights of the Peninsula behind and below me. I put on my windshield wipers after a while and closed the wing window; the wind was sharp and icy up there, and the penetrating dampness of the sea mist had sucked away all the warmth inside the car in a matter of a few seconds. I switched the heater on to the High position. Thick, stale air rushed through the floor and dash vents, but it seemed still to be cold, as if the moistness had somehow gotten permanently into the upholstery and the head-liner.

I found Old Southbridge Road without difficulty, and the narrow dirt road leading off it. I slowed there, just as I made the turn, and pulled off to the side and stared down as much of the road as I could see in the swirling, enveloping grayness. There were trees scattered on both sides-oak and bay and eucalyptus-and they had a strange, ethereal quality, like nightmarish illustrations in a book by Poe. There were not many homes in this particular area, and consequently, few lights and scarcely any sound at all except for the faint, wet slithering of the fog through the branches of the trees.

I looked at my watch, and it was ten minutes to ten. Okay. I checked the odometer, and then pulled out onto the road again and drove along exactly one mile. The fog swallowed the road behind me, and seemed to part reluctantly under the probing yellow cones of my headlight beams. The turnaround was there, on my right, a flat space beneath several bunched eucalyptus with their bark peeling off in great gray strips like dead and diseased skin. I stopped the car there and shut off the engine and the headlamps.

It was heavy dark, and I could just see the outlines of the trees on the opposite side of the road. What night sounds there were seemed muted and directionless, distorted by the thick and enshrouding fog. The luminescent dial of my wristwatch showed that it was now five minutes to ten.

I lit a cigarette, and in the flare of the match I could see my face reflected back at me in the door window; it looked pinched and apprehensive, a little old, a little tired. I shook out the match and dragged slowly on the cigarette and tried to ignore the viscid coldness which seemed to have settled between my shoulder blades.

Three minutes to ten.

I stabbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and caught up the suitcase in my right hand. All right, I thought. Here we go. I stepped out of the car and shut the door without slamming it. Cold tongues of fog licked at my face, wet and feathery, and I shivered involuntarily and hunched my shoulders inside the suit jacket. I wished I had had the sense to bring an overcoat; it was going to take me a long time to get warm again on this night.

I crossed the wet, dark, empty road and stood on the embankment at the opposite side. I could just make out the slope of the bank dropping away gently between a bay and an oak, the formless and unidentifiable shadows of undergrowth-but that was all. I could not see the road below; the mist was an impenetrable pocket, and as thick and clinging and grayly vibratory as gelatin.

If he’s down there, I thought, he can’t see me either. But he knows I’m here. He’d have heard the car.

I took a firmer grip on the suitcase, hefting it in my hand, and started down the embankment. The footing was none too good-the ground had a soft, spongelike consistency, strewn with wet leaves and moss, and I was forced to pick my way a half-step at a time, with my left arm flung out for balance and my right holding the case in close to my body. I had visions of getting lost, of not being able to find that flat sandstone rock, of missing the ten o’clock deadline, so that the kidnapper became frightened by the delay and panicked and ran. But that kind of thoughts were not getting me anything but uptight; I put them out of my mind and kept working my way down the slope.

Moments passed and it did not seem as if I had gone more than five or six feet, but when I turned to look upward, I could no longer see the top of the embankment. Visibility was maybe two feet in each direction. I took another step forward and down, careful, another, another- and then the rock was there, looming up out of the sodden turf like an oval picnic table, smooth and flat and shiny with mist.

I let breath out between my teeth in a soft, sibilant sigh and went carefully to the rock and put the suitcase down on top of it. As I straightened up, there was the sound of a twig cracking, a thin report, from somewhere below and to my right. I worked saliva into my mouth and turned and started up the embankment toward the road, leaning forward with my hands low to the ground in case I lost my footing.

I was almost to the roadbed again when I heard the scream.

It was a man’s voice, and the cry was filled with agony and terror, reverberating hellishly through the churning, hoary fog. I froze there on the slope, chills tumbling along my spine, a sudden vacuum in the pit of my stomach and down low in my groin, and in that moment there was a moaning, a panting, thrashing footfalls in the undergrowth, the sounds of a struggle.

I thought: Holy Christ! And then I thought: Run, get the hell out of here, you don’t want any part of what’s down there! But then I was straightening up and turning like a damned fool and moving back down the incline, to the sounds, to the flat sandstone rock and the suitcase with three hundred thousand dollars and maybe a boy’s life inside it.

My feet sluiced out from under me in my haste, and I landed flat on my back and slid a few feet before I could break my momentum and bring myself up again. I staggered upright, but I could not see anything in the wool-like density of the fog, groping my way blind, and there was another scream, same voice, short and sharp and trailing off in a kind of agonized sigh that was unmistakably the ending of a life, and then the sound of something falling heavily across brittle leafage.

The mist shredded suddenly in front of me and I could see the sandstone rock a couple of feet away on my left, and a black shadow bending over another shadow lying prone near it, and I pulled up short, turning my body toward the shadows and away from the rock, reflex only, not knowing at all what I was going to do, leaving myself unprotected. The bending figure whirled with the tails of a long coat flapping around its knees like folded black wings, and an arm came out and hit me in the stomach, a glancing blow sliding across, but Jesus! he must have had lead in his fist because the pain boils through my belly and I stumble backward and sit down hard and I can see him moving slow-motion away from me, to the rock, hefting the suitcase, moving again, blending with the fog, gone, vanished, and I try to get up but I can’t goddamn it he didn’t hit me that hard!

I put my hand there as I roll over onto my knees, and I feel wetness and warmth, how can that be, and then

I take my hand away and hold it up to my eyes and it is dripping, dripping dark fluid, and all at once I realize what has happened, I know what it is, he cut me the son of a bitch cut me he cut me with a goddamn knife!

And now the fire comes, the searing burning fire, and in my mind I see my entrails exposed to the gray-mold fog, I see my belly ripped open and my guts hanging out and the mist touching them like unwashed surgeon’s fingers, I hear a moan low and wailing but it is my voice this time and my guts oh God oh Jesus I’m going to die he cut me and I’m going to die

get up, get up and run but I can’t yes I can my vision all blurry or is that the fog or is that crying, no a man does not cry but the pain, get up

on my feet now, I don’t know how, and staggering forward with my hand holding them in and I see the shadow and he is dead with dark fluid leaking out from his belly, a stranger dead with his belly cut open

and I’m running up the embankment, feet sliding, half crazy with the pain and the fear and the fog so cold so dirty is all around me I’m dying you goddamn lousy world I’m alone and I’m dying for what, oh God what happened

the road now and the metal hood of my car like ice, clawing the door, falling inside

oh oh oh the dome light is on and I see the blood the blood oh no please no

the key find the ignition the gear stick one hand on the wheel and one to hold in my dripping guts

hurtling through grayness and blackness can’t think can’t see

sweat in my eyes and the pain you don’t know the pain and the blood I’m so frightened

light ahead help help but it’s too late I’m dying

look out look out car veering no control and going off look

* * * *