Why Me?

17

For Chief Inspector F. X. Mologna it had been a long long day—nearly eleven at night before he could descend to the garage beneath Police Headquarters and climb into the tan Mercedes-Benz sedan parked in the slot designated, in yellow stencil letters on the blacktop, C INSP MOLOGNA. A long day, but not an unpleasant one. He had given an exclusive interview and a general (and well-attended) press conference. He had thrown his weight around among a lot of federal and state officials. And he had given orders that would cause annoyance and harassment to thousands of people, one or two of whom might even turn out to have some involvement in the matter at hand. All in all, a good day.

Mologna backed out of his slot, drove up the ramp to the exit, and left Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway led him northeast to the Long Island Expressway, now fairly crowded with middle-class revelers returning from dinner-and-a-show in the city. As usual, Mologna listened to his police radio as he flowed eastward across Queens, hearing tonight the results of his dragnet order. One of these results was an increase in assaults on police officers, since several of the most irate arrestees had resorted to violence to express their indignation at being hauled off to the precinct for what seemed to them no good reason at all. But that too had its sunnier side; in such an incident, the cop might get a black eye, but the perpetrator would get a concussion and twenty months in Attica. Not a bad trade, from the police point of view.

Shortly after the Nassau County line, the police band faded away and Mologna switched to the regular radio, permanently tuned to an "easy listening" station—"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," played by a million violins. Mantovani lives.

Having gone public, it would now be necessary for Mologna to keep the press informed, or at least amused, between now and the recovery of the Byzantine Fire. He was the trainer, the media people were the porpoises, and the little events—arrests, press conferences, displays of weapons caches—were the fish that made the porpoises perform. If Mologna's police blitz had not turned up the ruby by tomorrow, he'd have to throw the newsboys a few more fish. In the morning, a simple update on the number of unrelated crimes solved and criminals arrested would do, but by afternoon he'd need something more. The simplest solution—and Mologna had never seen anything wrong with simple solutions—was to release a list of eight or nine known criminals in the city whom the police hadn't as yet been able to put the arm on, announcing that these were the ones the police were most interested in questioning. The implication would be that the investigation had narrowed down to these individuals—there's progress for you—but in fact the press release would not actually say any such thing. Easy. Simple solutions for simple people.

Soon Mologna switched to the Southern State Parkway, where the road was free of trucks and flanked by greensward and trees. All across Nassau County the traffic gradually thinned, cars peeling off at every exit, until by the Suffolk County line—less than ten miles from home—there was a mere scattering of taillights out front and headlights in the rear-view mirror. It was not quite midnight. Mologna would be in bed before one, up at nine, back behind his desk at Headquarters by ten-thirty.

Bay Shore. Mologna slowed for the exit, made the turn, and a car that had been rapidly overtaking him the last mile or so made a sharp right onto the exit as well, crowding him hard from the left.

A drunk, obviously, unfortunately not in Mologna's jurisdiction. He slowed to let the clown through.

But the clown also slowed. And there was another car also taking this exit, large in Mologna's rearview mirror. Hell of a time for a traffic jam, he thought, braked some more, and waited for the clown in the other car—green Chevrolet, absolutely unremarkable—to get under control and drive on.

But he didn't. He was angling across Mologna's lane, crowding Mologna onto the grassy shoulder, forcing Mologna to brake harder and harder—and to stop.

They all stopped. The car in front, Mologna, and the car in back. And at that point Mologna realized what was being done to him. Dry mouth, rapid heartbeat—somebody was out to get him. He reached under the dashboard for the.32 revolver he kept down there, but as he brought it out a glaring white light suddenly flooded him from the rear window of the car ahead. Blinded, blinking, he lifted the hand without the gun, shielded his eyes, turned his head away to the right, and saw movement. Outside there, having approached from the rear car, were two men, both wearing ski masks, one holding a Galil machine pistol, the other gesturing for Mologna to open the window on the passenger side.

I could pop one of them, Mologna thought. But he couldn't pop them all. And they'd made it clear—the light, the man with the machine pistol—that although they could already have popped him, they didn't intend to. At least not yet, and at least not if he didn't start popping first. So instead of popping anybody, Mologna put his revolver on the seat and pressed the button in his door that lowered the window on the other side.

The man stood well back from the car, lowering his head slightly so he could see Mologna. "Throw the gun out," he called, his voice low but carrying. He had some sort of accent; Mologna couldn't place it.

The chief inspector threw the gun out. Saliva had returned to his mouth, and his heart had slowed again. His first terror was being replaced by a lot of other feelings: anger, curiosity, irritation with himself for having been frightened.

The man stepped forward and got into the car, and as he did so the glaring light from the front car switched off, leaving the night darker than it had been. Trying to see through that darkness, Mologna studied the man beside him, who was dressed in black corduroy trousers, a dark plaid zippered jacket, and the ski mask, which was black with light-blue elks on it. He wore black-rimmed glasses over the mask, which made him look silly but no less threatening. His eyes were large, liquid, and dark. His hands were large, with short blunt fingers, chewed nails, unusually large and knobby knuckles. A workman's hands, a clerk's head, a foreign accent, and black corduroy trousers. No one in America wears black corduroy trousers.

The man said, "You are Chief Inspector Francis Mologna." He pronounced it right.

"That's fine," Mologna said. "And who would you be?"

"I have seen you on television," the man said. "You are in charge of the investigation into the disappearance of the Byzantine Fire."

"Ah-hah," said Mologna.

The man made a gesture to include the cars, his friend with the machine pistol, himself. "You can see," he said, "we are well organized and capable of swift decisive action."

"I been admirin you," Mologna told him.

"Thank you," said the man, ducking his ski-masked head in modest pleasure.

With the glaring light gone, Mologna could now see the license plate on the car in front, but there was no point memorizing it. That would be a rental car, to be abandoned half a mile from here.

"The Byzantine Fire," the man was saying, leaving off the modesty to become brisk once more, "does not belong to the government of Turkey. You will re-obtain it, but you will not give it to the government of Turkey. You will give it to us."

"And who are you?" Mologna was truly interested.

"We represent," the man said, not exactly answering the question, "the rightful owners of the Byzantine Fire. You will give it to us when it is re-obtained."

"Where?"

"We will contact you." The man looked as stern as anyone could when wearing spectacles over a ski mask. "We are, as I said, decisive," he told Mologna, "but we prefer whenever possible to avoid violence, particularly within the borders of a friendly nation."

"Makes sense," Mologna agreed.

"You drive a very nice car," the man said.

Mologna wasn't familiar with the term non sequitur, but he recognized the thing itself when he saw it. Still, one of the lessons life had given him was this: You go along with the man with the gun. "Sure, it is," he said.

"You have a very nice house," the man went on. "I drove past it earlier this evening. Right on the water."

"You drove past my house?" Mologna didn't like that much.

"Very expensive house, I should say." The man nodded. "I envied it, I must tell you that."

"You want a regular savins plan," Mologna told him.

"Very expensive car," the man continued, following his own obscure line of thought. "Very expensive family. Children in college. Wife with station wagon. St. Bernard dog."

"Don't forget the boat," Mologna said.

The man looked surprised, then pleased. He seemed happy for Mologna. "You have a boat? I didn't see it."

"This time of year, it's in the boathouse."

"The boathouse," echoed the man, savoring the word. "So that's what that was. Ah, to be an American. You have a boat, and you have a boathouse. How many many things you do have, after all."

"They do sort of mount up," Mologna admitted.

"How very well the Police Department must pay you," the man said.

Whoops. Mologna looked sharply through the glass in those spectacles at the eyes behind them, and those eyes seemed now to be amused, knowledgeable. So maybe the subject hadn't changed after all. "I do pretty well," Mologna said carefully.

"Astonishingly enough," the man said, "in the United States, salaries of government employees are public knowledge. I know what your official income is."

"You know so much about me," Mologna said. "And I know so little about you."

"For many reasons," the man said, "it seemed to us that you were the very best person to talk to in connection with the Byzantine Fire. We want it, you see. We will resort to violence if necessary, we will hunt the thief down ourselves and torture him with electric probes if necessary, but we would much prefer to be civilized."

"Civilized is nice," Mologna agreed.

"Therefore—" The man reached inside his jacket. Mologna flinched away, but what the man brought out was a white envelope. "This," the man said, hefting the envelope in the palm of his hand, "is twenty thousand dollars."

"Is it, then?"

The man opened Mologna's glove compartment and placed the envelope inside, then shut the glove compartment. "When you give us the Byzantine Fire," he said, "we shall give you another envelope, containing sixty thousand dollars."

"I call that generous," Mologna said.

"We want the Byzantine Fire," the man said. "You want eighty thousand dollars, and you do not want violence in your home city. Why should we not have a meeting of minds?"

"It don't sound bad," Mologna agreed. "But when we do get that ruby back, how'm I supposed to spirit it away? You think they'll just leave it lie around in a drawer somewhere?"

"We think, Chief Inspector, you are very imaginative, very clever, and in a position of some importance. We think you would have uses for eighty thousand dollars. We rely on your ingenuity."

"Do you, now? That's quite a compliment."

"We were very careful in choosing the right person to approach," the man said. His ski mask bunched and bubbled, suggesting that he was smiling. "I do not think," he said, "you will let us down."

"Oh, that would be cruel."

"We will contact you," the man promised. He opened the car door, stepped out, closed the door without slamming it, and went away to his own car with his armed friend. A moment later, both cars spun quickly away, and Mologna was alone.

"Well well," he said. "Well well well well well well well. Twenty thousand dollars. Sixty thousand dollars. Eighty thousand dollars. Great lumps of Manna out of Heaven." Taking his ring of keys out of the ignition, he locked the glove compartment, then climbed from the Mercedes, walked around it, found his revolver in the grass, and brought it back to the car. Then he drove home, where Brandy slobbered on his trousers, and he found Maureen in the family room, asleep before the TV, on which a suntanned actor chuckled meaninglessly, substituting for the substitute for Johnny Carson. Leaving Maureen where she was, absently patting Brandy, Mologna went through the house to his den, shut Brandy out, and phoned the FBI in New York. "Let me talk to Zachary," he said.

"He's home for the day."

"Put me through to him at home."

They didn't want to, but Mologna possessed a heavy, brooding, humorless authority that no minor clerk could stand up to for long, so fairly soon Zachary himself was on the line, sounding irritable: "Yes, Mologna? What is it at this hour? You found the ring?"

"A foreign fella in a ski mask offered me a bribe tonight," Mologna said. "If I would turn the ring over to him once I got it."

"A bribe?" Zachary sounded not so much astonished as bewildered, as though the very word were brand-new to him.

"Twenty thousand cash in an envelope. He put it in my glove compartment himself, with his own bare hands. I have it locked in there—I'll turn it over to the fingerprint people in the mornin."

"Twenty thousand dollars?"

"And sixty thousand more when I give them the ring."

"And you didn't take it?"

Mologna said not a word. He just sat there and let Zachary listen to his own monstrous question, until at last Zachary cleared his throat, mumbled something, coughed, and said, "I didn't mean that the way it sounded."

"Sure not," Mologna said. "Sorry to disturb you so late, but I wanted to report this right away. Should the good Lord in His infinite wisdom and mercy see fit to call me to His bosom this very evenin, I wouldn't want anyone to come across that envelope and think I meant to keep the dirty money."

"Oh, of course not," Zachary said. "Of course not." He still sounded more dazed than amazed.

"Good night to you, now," Mologna said. "Sleep well."

"Yes. Yes."

Mologna hung up and sat a moment in his comfortable den with the antique guns mounted on the wall, as Zachary's blurted question circled again in his mind: "And you didn't take it?" No, he didn't take it. No, he wouldn't take it. What did the man think he was? You don't get to be top cop in the great city of New York by takin bribes from strangers.