Tongue tied

Chapter 19

It was almost 1:30 by the time I climbed the stairs to Broadway and Seventy-ninth into a steady warm rain shower. It hadn't been raining in Brooklyn, but meteorologically New York was a vast continent, and I had moved underground from the Cote d'lvoire to Ethiopia.

Rainwear or an umbrella would have been nice, but haste was going to have to do.

Where were the Bumber-shoot people when you needed them most? Whenever Timmy and I had visited European cities in warm weather-Amsterdam, Paris, Florence-we had marveled at the way in which, whenever rain began to fall, tall Africans suddenly materialized selling umbrellas. We had concluded that the umbrella merchants were all members of a West African tribe called the Bumbershoot people. But either the Bumbershoots had not yet made it to New York, or Giuliani had had them all rounded up and shipped back to Europe.

Most of the Upper West Side coffee shops and Chinese and Greek restaurants were shut down by now, but the bars were still open, and there were still plenty of people on Broadway hurrying home or to whatever or whoever was next on their Saturday night dance cards. Just below Seventy-seventh, Big Nick's burger joint, open twenty-four hours, was lively, with people at tables out on the sidewalk under the scaffolding of a building that had been under renovation since early in the Abe Beame administration.

I found an open newsstand and picked up an early-edition Sunday Times, a News and a Post. Plankton's kidnapping was front-page but below the fold in the Times – Jay Plankton Abducted Outside Apartment -and full-page on the fronts of both the News -

Plankton Kidnapped -and the Post – Gay Radicals Snatch J-Bird.

I seated myself at a scuffed plastic table under the scaffolding at Nick's, the Upper West Side version of a cafe on the Champs-Elysees, and ordered black coffee from the harried middle-aged waitress, who looked Cambodian. I ordered the coffee because I had realized back on the platform of the Fourteenth and Seventh subway station that I was going to be up for a while, probably all night and into the next day. I wanted a shower first, and to make some phone calls, but I expected to be back in Brooklyn before the night was through, and then even farther out on Long Island.

While I worked at Nick's coffee, I read the news accounts of the two kidnappings and of Leo Moyle's release. Both the News and the Post had front-paged the "I V Ricky Martin" and "Kiss Me, Elton" tattoo pix, while the Times had chosen to forgo the lurid graphics and let a file photo of Plankton suffice. In the picture he looked far from wholesome, not a figure any self-respecting kidnapper would want to lay hands on, it seemed to me.

The stories on the abductions and Moyle's release were straightforward accounts from police sources and from those few eyewitnesses to the events Saturday afternoon outside the J-Bird's apartment. The FFF figured in all the stories, but the police said they could not be sure that the few vague but ominous communications they had received from the supposed kidnappers were legitimate.

Leo Moyle, all three papers said, remained under police protection in his East Side apartment and had not made himself available to reporters. Jerry Jeris, speaking for Moyle, said that Moyle had weathered his captivity "as well as could be expected," that he was praying for the safe release of his friend, and that he would be filling in for the J-Bird on his show, starting Monday at