Tongue tied

Chapter 17

"Christ, it's another planet, these media guys," Barner was saying. "It's all ratings, and like that. This guy's been abducted, and what are his asshole buddies talking about? Juicing up the show, and who goes on the air, and how to cash in."

"Don't be too sweeping in your condemnation of the broadcast media, Lyle. I listen to National Public Radio, where I'm sure it's different. If Noah Adams was kidnapped, Linda Wertheimer and Robert Siegel wouldn't cynically sensationalize the event and turn into mike hogs. They'd offer themselves as substitute hostages, or at the very least recruit a group of public-spirited NPR underwriters to take Adams's place. Maybe Jennifer and Ted Stanley."

Barner, at the wheel of his NYPD unmarked Ford, let this pass without comment. We were headed down the FDR toward the Williamsburg Bridge, and traffic was heavy and slow. I'd heard New Yorkers in Columbia County and the Berkshires talk about how the city empties out on summer weekends. Then, who was clogging the streets and highways on this steamy Saturday night in July? Had the population of Philadelphia been recruited to drive up and keep the New York bridge-and-tunnel toll collectors from growing bored and the asphalt from buckling owing to lack of use? It was a conundrum.

There was a more pressing puzzle, too. That was the question of Thad Diefendorfer's having neglected to inform me that the Lancaster County presumably Amish friend he was going to hang out with in Brooklyn was his old FFF boyfriend, Sammy Day. "Day" didn't sound Amish, but I supposed it could once have been Dazenburger or Dazenfeffer. Did Amish people who left their traditional communities behind for twenty-first-century life sometimes change their names as part of their assimilation? I didn't know.

And what was the business of one of Leo Moyle's captors accusing Moyle of being a sinner and an "unrighteous man"? What was that about? It didn't sound like FFF lingo, original or neo. It sounded downright Amish, in fact, according to what Diefendorfer had been telling me. And who were these people with their mysterious comings and goings at Sam Day's Brooklyn apartment at all hours of the day and night?

Maybe I would soon find out, because it's where Barner and I were en route to. We planned on simply knocking on the door and asking Diefendorfer and Day a series of pertinent questions. And, as a precaution, Barner had arranged to have additional police officers on hand should they be needed. Meanwhile, Barner also had a team of detectives checking out metropolitan-area tattoo artists, one of whom was apparently sufficiently angry at homophobes and radicalized enough to show up and do the inkwork on a kidnapped, bound, and blindfolded Leo Moyle on a Friday night.

Barner tuned the car radio to WINS, where a variety of New Yorkers, from Grand Central to Yankee Stadium, offered comments to reporters on what WINS called the

"shocking" abduction of Jay Plankton. Some interviewees weren't sure who Plankton was. One seemed to confuse him with Howard Stern and another, inexplicably, with Al Sharpton. But most knew of the J-Bird and seemed to regard the kidnapping with a mixture of sympathy, concern and bemusement. It wasn't, after all, as if Walter Cronkite had been dragged off. There was one mild anti-FFF, anti-gay epithet that was allowed on the air and, in the interests of what radio and television news professionals think of as "balanced coverage," a gay man on Christopher Street presenting a reap-what-you-sow argument.

Mayor Giuliani had appeared on the steps of city hall to plead with the kidnappers to treat the J-Bird with "compassion" and to remind them that if they harmed Plankton they would have to pay a "very, very heavy price." One resourceful reporter tracked down Ed Koch and asked his opinion of the FFF. The sort of gay, semi-out former mayor said the FFF meant well but had gone too far-"Violence is never the answer" and in any event was wasting its time going after "a basically harmless gasbag like Jay Plankton."

Senatorial candidates Rick Lazio and Hillary Clinton released nearly identical statements announcing that they and their staffs and supporters were all praying for the J-Bird's safety and early release. These prayers apparently were private, for no vigils or services were planned by either of the competing office-seekers.

Word of Leo Moyle's tattoos had already leaked, WINS reported. A spokesman for Ricky Martin said the singer would have no comment, but Elton John was quoted as saying he looked forward to a joint appearance with Moyle at the next Academy Awards show. No one was sure if he was kidding. Moyle himself was described by WINS as

"in seclusion" at his East Side apartment. Jerry Jeris told the station Moyle was grateful for the support and prayers of all the J-Bird show's fans, who, he said, should tune in on Monday to hear Moyle's description of his "night of terror" and his thoughts about it.

As we pulled onto the ramp for the old Erector-set contraption called the Williamsburg Bridge, Barner said, "Are you still pissed off at me?" "Why?"

"For fucking up the thing you had going with your farmboy crush, that hottie Thaddie."

"I'm not happy, Lyle, that you were operating behind my back. But I was operating behind yours to a certain extent, so what can I say?" Barner glanced my way as we hurtled across the vibrating old steel span. "That's a rare admission for you, Strachey.

What's come over you?"

"But apparently I need to explain to you one more time, Lyle-or twenty-five more times, if that's what it takes- that I am not now having, nor have I ever had, nor do I ever intend to have, a romantic relationship with Thad Diefen-dorfer. I concede that my erotic life may once have resembled that of Patti Smith and her band. But with the rare, odd, innocuous deviation, the life Timothy Callahan and I now lead most resembles that of Gerald and Betty Ford. So if you don't mind, you can just knock off the hot Thaddie routine."

With no particular inflection, Barner said, "You're lying."

I could think of no reply as we rumbled down onto the ancient streets of Brooklyn.

After a moment, I asked Lyle, "What's with you and Dave tonight? Speaking of nonexistent threesomes, or fivesomes, or whatever it isn't."

"Nothing's with Dave and me tonight," Barner said. "I'm on duty, obviously, and he's out on the Island somewhere with… with his poppers and hi s God-knows-what-other-mind-altering-substances and some other guys. I wasn't invited this time."

"About which you are probably ambivalent."

"Yeah."

"When will you see him again?"

"It depends," Barner said. "1 heard from my captain earlier, and he's feeling the heat to bring Jay Plankton back safe and sound to his fans and ex-wives within a matter of hours or preferably minutes. So there's no getting around that that'll be my job twenty-four-seven until Plankton is freed."

"It's almost like the FFF kidnapped Giuliani himself, or Pataki, or George Steinbrenner."

"You got it."

"I'm sure Dave understands your situation, what with his being an officer who aspires to the police detective's life."

"Yeah, Dave says he wouldn't mind working this case himself just to test his oath and his loyalty to the department. He thinks that any grief that falls Jay Plankton's way is just what the bastard has coming. And Dave wasn't sure how hard he'd work to save Plankton from being tortured, at least psychologically. Dave regards Plankton's radio show as a form of psychological torture."

"As do so many of us. But for most of us, our work does not require constant exposure to the J-Bird and his rants."

"Dave once told me that having the J-Bird show on in the squad room every morning is like a scene in some book he read in high school where the government stuffed a guy's head into a small cage and let a hungry rat loose in it. Or threatened to, anyway."

"That's Orwell's 1984. Dave's is a pretty extreme reaction. Plankton seems to me more gnatlike than ratlike. But anyway I can just choose not to listen."

"For me," Barner said, "torture is having to listen to hip-hop."

"I agree we're a long way from when the cultural heroes of the country's black underclass-and hip middle class- were Ellington and Basie. But the culture as a whole is cruder and meaner. Black people have no monopoly on that."

"Maybe that's what the kidnappers are doing to Plankton right now-making him listen to hip-hop," Barner said.

"For Plankton, that would certainly fit the description of 'feeling the pain,' what the kidnappers said they had in store for the J-Bird."

"Although," Barner said, "if it's Plankton's homophobia that the FFFers are mad about, they probably have some gay-something they're using to get under Plankton's skin."

"Right. Like the tattoos Moyle got. But something that won't just insult Plankton but. .. 'educate' him was what they told Moyle. Moyle was uneducable, the FFFers said, but Plankton, a better candidate for some reason, was headed for the reeducation farm. I don't know what the FFFers have in mind, but the term is ominous. Maoists used it in China and Cambodia."

"Aren't the Amish sort of communistic?" Barner said.

Back to Thad. "No, I don't think so, Lyle. Well, yes, in the sense that there's a theory of sharing, and nonconformity is discouraged. But I don't think the Amish rough people up when they stray from the Mennonite party line. They just treat them like they don't exist. Whoever's got Jay Plankton isn't shunning him. They seem to want him to suffer and to change through suffering."

"Maybe that's not Amish," Barner said, "but it does sound religious. Mennonite is, like, a religion, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's a Christian church, though I think the Men-nonites believe in simplicity and self-abnegation, but not self-flagellation."

"I guess Thaddie doesn't have to self-flagellate," Barner said. "Not with you and Timothy Callahan around."

I decided not to try to sort that one out. Instead, I turned up the radio, which described traffic conditions-"flowing smoothly" was the overly optimistic description-as well as the weather. The forecaster said clouding up, then rain early Sunday. This was followed by another report on the abduction of the J-Bird. Little new information was offered, just the release of a statement from the Bush campaign saying the Texas governor had been shocked and saddened by "this attack on a great American," and the entire campaign was praying for Plankton's safe return to his loved ones.

I said to Barner, "There's no relief for the deity's listening posts tonight."

"The pols are keepin' the Almighty hoppin'," he muttered, and hung a right onto Union Avenue.