Protocol for a Kidnapping (3 page)

I called Myron Greene. “No more,” I said.

“No more what?”

“No more international stuff. No more African colonels with big warm smiles and greedy little lies. No more State Department types. No more dead bodies, imported or domestic. No more—”

“I thought we handled it all quite well, everything considered,” he said.

“You think we did?” I said, bearing down hard on the
we
only to notice that it flitted right by him.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. I’ve already made arrangements with the museum for your fee to be paid in full.”

“They must have liked that,” I said.

“Not really; not after I pointed out that a lawsuit could prove most embarrassing to all concerned.”

“Let’s keep it simple from now on, Myron. You know. The purloined necklace, the missing bearer bonds, the stolen securities, even the kidnapped company comptroller. They’re more in line with whatever talents I have to offer. An international diddle isn’t.”

“We’ve never had a kidnapped company comptroller,” he said with all the earnest literalness of his profession.

“If we do, let’s make sure he’s a local boy. Or even a du Pont from Delaware. But no more international trade. They’re not at all keen on following the rules.”

“Very well, if you insist,” he said a little stiffly, I felt, as if making a note to send me a white feather that afternoon. “But I think you should admit that the entire affair was fascinating.”

“Fascinating,” I said, hung up, and tried to recall the exact day that an incurable romantic had been foisted on me as lawyer, business manager, and principal source of income. I wanted to mark it off on the calendar as a date not to remember.

So now we stood there in the rear of that drafty, rented hall which had seen ten thousand meetings held and ten thousand committees formed and perhaps fifty thousand resolutions passed, all for or against something that no longer mattered to anyone, while I listened to Myron Greene explain why I had to be in an office on the third floor of the State Department in Washington the following day.

When he finished, I said, “I told you no more international stuff, Myron.”

“But you know him,” he said. “And they know that you know him.”

“That was a long time ago. I didn’t like him even then and it was a fully reciprocated feeling.”

“He hired you,” Greene said. “He gave you your very first job.”

“And fired me. From my very first job.”

Myron Greene was silent for a moment as he carefully undid and then refastened the six leather-covered buttons on his heather tweed Norfolk jacket that I hoped wouldn’t shake the confidence of whomever he was seeing downtown. When he was through fooling with his jacket he smoothed back his blond hair whose length would draw no stares on Madison, but might earn a disapproving glance from a Superior Court judge, providing Greene ever ventured into a courtroom, which he had done only twice during the five years that I’d known him. Myron Greene’s clients, but for me, weren’t the kind who were haled into court.

“Well, I’m afraid that you’ll have to keep the appointment in any event,” he said and directed a stubborn stare past my shoulder. I turned to see what was so fascinating but it was only Wisdom and Henry Knight chuckling at each other as they took down the
CHEAPAR
banner. The audience and the press had gone.

“Why?” I said.

“Because they want to explain it to you personally.”

“Tell them to call me.”

“I told them you’d be there at eleven. Tomorrow.”

“Now you can tell them that I won’t.”

“Sorry, but it’s either-or now.”

“Either-or what?”

“Either you show up in Washington at eleven tomorrow or a federal marshal serves you here with a subpoena at noon.” His stubborn stare turned on me and now it was corporation lawyer Greene informing the executive board that there was nothing to be done but file bankruptcy proceedings and yes, it was a damned shame about all those widow and orphan stockholders.

“Subpoena for what?” I said.

Myron Greene smiled slightly. “For Congressman Royker’s subcommittee.”

“Royker’s a fool.”

“Even a fool can open up a can of worms,” Greene said wisely.

“What can?”

“He could start poking into what really happened to the shield and the Africans and the oil crowd. He’s good at things like that as long as they produce headlines. And the headlines should be interesting, but you’d know more about that than I would.”

“You were supposed to have fixed it,” I said. “You were supposed to have gone around with dustpan and whisk broom and tidied it all up.”

Myron Greene smiled again. It was broader this time, almost friendly. I also noticed that he was no longer wheezing. “Oh, I did,” he said. “I told them that you’d be there.”

I walked over to the door and gazed down the long flight of stairs. If I hurried, I could be in Mexico tomorrow. Guadalajara perhaps; that had a nice ring. Instead, I turned and went slowly back to Myron Greene.

“How much are the kidnappers asking?”

“For the ambassador?”

“For the Chicken.”

“Is that what you called him?”

“We did when he was managing editor. I don’t know what they called him when he got to be publisher. He’d fired me by then.”

“A million dollars.”

“You didn’t say it right, Myron. There wasn’t enough reverence in your tone and that means that there’s not going to be any ten percent.”

He nodded.

“Five?” I said without much hope.

He shook his head this time. “Three,” he said, “and I had to press for that.”

“Hard?”

“Very hard.”

“State must not think he’s worth a million either,” I said. “How long have they had him?”

“Since day before yesterday. Saturday.”

“Another day or two and whoever’s got him will make State an offer to take him back.”

“I don’t think so,” Myron Greene said.

“You don’t know him.”

“The kidnappers are demanding something more.”

“What?”

“Not what. Who.”

“All right. Who?”

“Anton Pernik. The poet.”

“He’s in jail.”

“House arrest really.”

“I never could read him.”

“He won the Nobel Prize,” Myron Greene said.

“So did Sinclair Lewis and I can’t read him either.”

“Well?” Myron Greene asked.

“I don’t know anyone in Belgrade.”

“It didn’t happen in Belgrade,” he said. “It happened in Sarajevo.”

“It sometimes does,” I said, “but I don’t know anyone there either.”

“The Yugoslav government has expressed its willingness to cooperate.”

“They’ll give up Pernik?”

“Yes.”

“They probably can’t read him either.”

“Your services were requested, of course.”

“By whom, Killingsworth?”

“No,” he said and smiled again, even more broadly than before. Myron Greene was enjoying himself. “Not by the ambassador. By Anton Pernik.”

“Maybe I’ll try to read him again,” I said.

A
MFRED KILLINGSWORTH HAD BEEN
managing editor of the
Chicago Post
only six months in 1957 before
Who’s Who
got around to sending him a form letter that contained a request for a brief life history along with the usual hard sell pitch to buy the 1958 edition at a sizable discount.

Killingsworth ordered a dozen copies and then used four 8½” x 11” sheets, single-spaced, to tell all about himself and the high points of his life, beginning with the American Legion oratory prize of five dollars that he won in 1932 when he was eleven and in Miss Nadine Cooper’s 6-A class at Horace Mann school in Omaha. I know because he gave me his own draft to boil down to three pages.

“Four pages is just a shade too long, don’t you think?” he said in that deep butterscotch voice of his that made “please pass the salt” sound even better than the first line in
Moby Dick.

“I don’t know,” I said, rolling a sheet of paper into my typewriter, “you’ve led a rather fulsome life.”

I’m not sure why I bothered to play my word games with Killingsworth because all he’d said was, “Yes,” nodded his big, square, blond head in thoughtful agreement, and added, “I guess that’s the right word for it.” Then he’d started to leave, but turned back to say, “By the way, if you can’t boil me down to three pages, Phil, three and a half will do just fine.”

I think the only person with more space in
Who’s Who
the following year was Douglas MacArthur.

Killingsworth had been thirty-seven when he was named managing editor of the
Post
and his autobiography (which modesty kept him from writing until he was forty) could have been called
I Was There, Charlie,
because he had been. Instead, he called it
The Killingsworth Story
and it sold 619 copies. An untroubled cynic on the
Post
once remarked that the only thing Killingsworth had missed during World War II was the line at an army induction center.

He had been at Pearl Harbor, of course, on December 7, 1941. He was on his way back from the Moral Rearmament oratorical finals for college seniors in Manila and when the attack came, Killingsworth was delivering an abbreviated fifteen-minute version of his speech over a Honolulu radio station. After the staff announcer panicked, a quick-thinking engineer hustled Killingsworth up to the roof, handed him a microphone, and told him to start talking. He was good at that and so by shortwave Amfred Killingsworth gave one of the first eyewitness accounts of the Japanese attack, describing everything he saw and a hell of a lot of what he imagined—such as the Japanese landing at Waikiki.

An hour after the radio networks had transcribed and rebroadcast his description in the States, Killingsworth received six job offers. He picked the one from the
Chicago Post
because his father had bought it every Sunday morning for seventeen years on the strength of its comic section.

After that, Amfred Killingsworth’s by-line topped warm, often soggy human interest stories from Corregidor, New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, Washington, North Africa, London, Normandy, Leyte Gulf, Chungking, Iwo Jima, Rome, Rheims, Berlin, and from aboard the U.S.S.
Missouri
on September 2, 1945. He usually managed to get either a dog or a cat into his stories.

When the war ended, Killingsworth was made editorial page editor of the
Post
where it really didn’t matter whether he could write or even spell. He was twenty-five years old. A year later, with his eye on his future if not on his bride, he married Norma, the thirty-three-year-old daughter of Obadiah Singleton, editor and publisher of the
Post.
Singleton was then seventy-three and obsessed with his antivivisection crusade, his paper’s annual National Junior Wrestling Tournament, the Communist conspiracy (both international and domestic), the machinations of Wall Street, and the welfare of his daughter—in just about that order. Norma suffered occasional mild seizures, endured a bad case of postadolescent acne, and lusted after bellhops, delivery men, cab drivers, and bartenders. “The best time to catch her,” a cab driver had once told a mildly interested
Post
reporter, “is when she goes into that fit. I mean it’s a real tough ride.”

Killingsworth quickly got his new bride with child and then left for a three-year assignment in Europe as roving correspondent. He especially liked to cover the tulip festival in Holland. When he came back to Chicago, he again took over the editorial page and that’s where he stayed until one night in early 1957 when old man Singleton wandered down to the city room and found the managing editor drunk. He wasn’t as drunk as usual, but Singleton couldn’t tell the difference, so he fired him. When he was through with that, he turned to three reporters and a rewrite man and fired them for, as he later put it, “just standing around gawking.”

The next day Singleton named his son-in-law managing editor and three days later Killingsworth hired me to replace one of the fired reporters. He’d said, “I like the cut of your jib, St. Ives; welcome aboard,” and thus acquired himself a lifelong enemy.

There was no reason to tell Hamilton Coors any of this as we sat in the third-floor State Department office that seemed to belong to no one in particular. I was watching it snow; Coors was watching me watch. Neither of us had said anything for twenty or thirty seconds.

“Tell me more about the dirty linen,” I said finally.

“Killingsworth’s a fool, of course,” Coors said without rancor, but not without a trace of sadness.

“How do the Yugoslavs rate him?”

“Unofficially, they’ve asked that he be recalled.”

“Are their complaints general or specific?” I said. “Or both?”

Coors’s eyes left me and wandered around the room, but there wasn’t much to see, so they finally settled on the flag. “Do you remember Alexander Rankovic?”

“Just the name,” I said. “He was once something or other in the Yugoslav government.”

“Vice-president,” Coors said, “until five or six years ago when Tito kicked him out.”

“I remember now, but I don’t remember why.”

“Rankovic wasn’t only vice-president, he was also head of the UDBA, its secret police.”

“Well, they did give him something to do.”

Coors frowned and said, “Mmmm,” to let me know that he didn’t regard my remark as substantive. “There were charges and even countercharges for a while,” he said, “but the real blowup came when Tito claimed to have found a hidden microphone in his own house.”

“That could well cause a rift.”

From behind closed lips Coors gave his opinion of my remark with another “Mmmm,” and then said, “Rankovic was charged, stripped of his public office, and finally forced into obscurity. He was never tried publicly.”

“Then what?”

“Rankovic had a confidential assistant who’d been with him since the war. His name is Jovan Tavro. What Rankovic knew as head of the secret police, Tavro also knew. A few weeks ago, Tavro started to meet secretly with Killingsworth.”

“Who never could keep anything to himself.”

“He didn’t tell us.”

“Who did.”

“The Yugoslavs. It upset them so much that they became, well, insistent about Killingsworth’s recall.”