Stolen Away (16 page)

“It seems to me that you are doing the most dangerous job,” Condon said, sympathetically.

“I know it.”

“You’re getting a mere ten thousand dollars. I don’t think you’re getting your fair share.”

“I know it.”

“Look, John—leave them. Come with me to my house. I will get you one thousand dollars from my savings and see if I can get you more money from Colonel Lindbergh. That way, you’ll be on the law’s side.”

John shook his head and said, “No—I can’t do that. The boss would smack me out. They’d drill me.”

“You’ll be caught, John! Think of your mother!”

“We won’t be caught. We plan too careful—we prepared a year for this.”

Condon then offered to exchange himself as a hostage for the child; and when John turned him down, Condon asked to at least be taken to the baby. Surely John didn’t expect that the Lindbergh forces would pay the money without first seeing the child.

“No!” John said. “Number One would drill us both, if I took you there. But I will send by ten o’clock Monday morning proof we have the boy.”

“Proof?”

“His sleeping suit.”

Then, Condon claimed, John spent several minutes assuring the doctor, who brought up the subject, that Red Johnson and Betty Gow were not involved in the kidnapping; that they were innocent.

“This,” Condon said to me, “should be a relief to the Lindberghs and the police as well.”

I didn’t respond. My thoughts didn’t exactly mirror the old goat’s: I found it suspicious as hell that Condon would ask John about Johnson and Gow, and ridiculous that a kidnapper would ‘heatedly’ stick up for these strangers…unless of course they weren’t strangers to him.

John, rising to go, had asked a final question. “You will put another ad in the Bronx
Home News
?”

“I will,” Condon said.

“Say ‘Money is ready,’” John said, walking backward, lifting a finger. “And this time, it better be.”

And he turned and slipped into darkness.

“You shook hands with him,” I said, “before he went off into the woods.”

“Yes,” Condon said, “but not as friends. Rather as negotiators who have come to a preliminary meeting of minds.”

Any meeting of minds with Dr. John F. Condon was a poorly attended affair.

But the professor was tickled with himself and his adventure—delighted that channels were open for continued negotiations that would lead to the boy’s safe return.

I was hoping Wilson’s men had followed us here, had been silently watching, and had shadowed “John” home.

Yet I couldn’t help feeling I’d fucked up, that I should have got out of the car to eavesdrop and either follow this bastard “John,” or just nab him and beat the life, or the truth, out of him.

Whichever came first.

The sleeping suit, which “John” had promised would be in Condon’s hands by ten o’clock Monday morning, did not arrive until Wednesday’s mail.

The days between were both tedious and tense, though the weather had turned pleasant. Overnight winter had transformed itself into spring, which wasn’t entirely good news, as it heralded a new, worse-than-ever tourist assault on the Lindbergh estate. The New Jersey State cops were in their element, for a change, finally doing what they were qualified to do: direct traffic. Schwarzkopf’s boys in their spiffy uniforms manfully warded off the sightseers, although—somewhat ironically, considering whose estate it was—the interlopers who could not be curtailed were the airplane pilots who, at $2.50 a ticket, were flying over the house and grounds all the sunny day long, to the delight of their rubbernecking passengers and the annoyance of all us on the ground.

On Tuesday, two weeks since the kidnapping, Colonel Schwarzkopf held a press conference about, among other things, Henry “Red” Johnson; seemed the sailor had been deemed innocent of any wrongdoing in the Lindbergh case, but was in federal custody awaiting deportation for entering the country illegally. What Schwarzkopf didn’t tell the newshounds—because he didn’t know it—was that I’d suggested to Frank Wilson of the IRS that Johnson’s deportation proceed at a snail’s pace, in case later on Johnson turned out not to be quite so “innocent.”

Wilson continued to be cooperative with me, and I with him, but he had confirmed my suspicion, the night of the cemetery rendezvous with “John”: nobody had trailed Condon and me, and nobody had, accordingly, been able to tail and trail John home.

“The orders come straight from the top,” Wilson told me. “Lindbergh and Mills are pals, you know.”

Wilson meant Ogden Mills, Secretary of the Treasury.

“That’s insane,” I said.

“We’ve been told to lay off,” Wilson told me gloomily. “No stakeout on Condon, no interference in any way in how Colonel Lindbergh wants the case handled.”

Hamstrung as they were, Wilson and the IRS agents were continuing their own investigation, including the ongoing search for Capone’s man Bob Conroy; but Jafsie, John and the whole sorry crew were getting a free ride.

Around ten-thirty Wednesday morning at his house in the beautiful borough of the Bronx, Professor Condon received a pliant oblong brown-paper package, obviously the sleeping suit, though the old boy didn’t open the bundle. Instead he called Breckinridge, at the attorney’s office, to arrange for Lindbergh himself to come do the honors. Condon said he had his reasons for this, and one of them was obviously a desire to have Lucky Lindy as a houseguest.

But it was well after dark before Lindbergh and I were able to sneak away from the estate. The place was still crawling with reporters and sightseers. I drove the flivver, and Lindy crouched in back, wearing a cap and large-lensed amber glasses and a flannel shirt and well-worn, faded denim pants; it was a cool night, but he wore no topcoat—he looked like a delivery boy. He had the baby face for it.

We arrived at Condon’s Bronx bungalow a little after 1:00
A.M
. The professor answered the door and, for a moment, didn’t know who Lindbergh was, till the amber glasses were removed. Not that Slim’s disguise was impenetrable: I figured Condon gave himself the same puzzled expression every morning in the mirror.

“I have something for you,” Condon told Lindbergh archly, as we followed him through the hallway and into the living room, where Colonel Breckinridge—still Condon’s houseguest—waited.

The brown-paper bundle was on the grand piano, on the paisley shawl.

“Are you quite sure,” Condon said, touching Lindbergh’s arm, “that you wish—that you can
bear
—to inspect the contents of this package?”

Lindbergh said nothing; he just reached for the package and began to carefully unwrap it, like a fussy woman undoing a Christmas present, wanting to save the colorful paper for next year. A note had been enclosed, which he set aside. He lifted out a small woolen garment—a gray sleeping suit. A red label in the back collar identified it as a Dr. Denton’s, size two.

Lindbergh looked at it curiously. He sniffed it. “I think it’s been laundered,” he said.

“Let me have a look,” I said.

He handed it to me hesitantly, as if the slack suit were the child itself.

“It could’ve been washed,” I said, taking it, examining it. “Or it could be new. Whoever sent it might’ve had to go out and buy it.”

Lindbergh’s face squeezed in on itself. “How would they know what to buy? The description we gave the papers was purposely misleading.”

That was true: the press had been told, and printed, that the sleeping suit was a “fine, white balbriggan” that buttoned in front with a backflap. This one buttoned in back, and was gray, with a breast pocket.

“Somebody who worked around your kid would know,” I said.

He grimaced irritably and said, “I’m convinced this is the sleeping suit.”

“Well, then. You’re convinced. Better have a look at the note.”

He did. We all did. It was signed with the by-now-familiar interlocking-circles signature. It said:

It continued on the reverse:

“What does this mean,” Breckinridge asked, taking the note. “This business of ‘Circumstance will not allow us to make a transfer like you wish.’”

“I pleaded with him,” Condon said, “that I might be taken to the place where the child was being kept, to ascertain the boy’s health and safety.”

“If he won’t let us see the child before the money is paid,” Lindbergh said glumly, “we’ll pay it anyway.”

“Well, after all,” Condon said, cheerfully, “this fellow has kept his word with us throughout. And we’ve kept our word with him.”

“Yes,” Lindbergh said, eyes at once haunted and bright. “There’s no reason to think they won’t deliver my son as soon as they get their money.”

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing short of a couple of straitjackets that would straighten this pair out on this subject.

“We’d best draft our response to the kidnappers,” Condon said, putting a grandfatherly hand on his famous guest’s shoulder. “For the newspaper ad.”

We sat in the living room and Condon, Breckinridge and Lindbergh hashed it out. I didn’t contribute. I was thinking about Chicago, now that the snow would be thawing.

“We can’t let negotiations drag on too long,” Lindbergh was saying. “If the kidnappers get impatient, or the newspapers get wind of this, my son could pay with his life.”

“Sir,” Condon said, “I think it’s important for us to at least try to see the baby before the money is paid.”

I almost fell off the couch: the old boy had said something that actually made sense.

“No,” Lindbergh said. “We’re in no position to make demands. It’s their game: we play by their rules. Run the ad they want.”

A little after three in the morning, Condon’s pretty, sullen daughter Myra entered and offered us a light meal in the dining room. I didn’t know why she was here, and I didn’t ask. But she was marginally friendlier this time around, probably because of the famous presence of Colonel Lindbergh; and her chicken-salad sandwiches and lemonade were fine. Half an hour later we began to leave, and Lindbergh paused at the grand piano in the living room, where on the paisley shawl the unwrapped brown-paper package had been set.

Lindbergh reached for the package, quickly, impatiently, and handed it to me, like it was something hot.

“We’d better get back,” he said to me, “and show this to Anne.”

I drove—the most famous pilot in the world my passenger. We rode silently for a good long time. We approached the George Washington Bridge, its silver arc indistinct against the night, a parade of flickering lights moving across it over the Hudson. We joined that parade and when urban New Jersey faded into rural New Jersey, he began to speak.

“You think I’m foolish, don’t you, Nate?”

“I think you’re human. The problem is, most of the people you get advice from don’t.”

He was looking absently out the side window, into darkness. He was still wearing the amber glasses and cap; he wore them all the way home. “I’m anxious to have this over.”

“Don’t get too anxious.”

He looked at me. “Do you trust Condon?”

“Not particularly.”

“Do you think he’s an accomplice?”

“Maybe. Or a dupe.”

“Or exactly what he seems to be?”

“Which is what, Slim?”

“A good-hearted old patriot who wants to help out…” And he trailed off.

“Who wants to help out the ‘Lone Eagle’? Maybe. A bigger question is, are these extortionists the people who have your son?”

“You don’t think they are?”

“They could be operating off inside information from servants, or from Mickey Rosner. They don’t know anything I don’t know, for example. And what the hell do you know about me?”

“I know I trust you.”

“Well, you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t trust any fucking body.”

“I trust my own instincts.”

“And your instincts tell you that ‘John’ is one of the kidnappers?”

He shook his head from side to side, but it was not in a “no” gesture. “I’m not closing off any avenue I can go down to find my son. And this sleeping suit…”

“This sleeping suit is standard, issue, Slim. Store-bought, lacking in laundry marks, or any other identification. There are thousands, tens of thousands, like it.”

“I gave the newspapers a false description of the garment, remember?”

“I remember. So the extortionists could have got lucky, or they could have had inside information. Here’s another thought—doesn’t your son have his own bedroom at your wife’s mother’s house, at Englewood?”

“Why, yes,”

“How many of these sleepers, how many sleepers just like this one, are there in a drawer in that Englewood nursery?”

“I don’t know. I don’t believe we have an exact inventory for such things.”

“Right. And how many servants do they have in that joint? Around thirty—any one of whom could have provided a description, or plucked a sleeping suit from a drawer. That would explain why it took several days for Cemetery John and crew to deliver those pj’s. And why it’s freshly laundered.”

He didn’t say anything.

“For that matter, Condon himself could’ve taken a sleeper from your son’s drawer.”

“Are you serious?”

“He could’ve, just like I could’ve. We both slept in that room. I caught Condon going through your kid’s toy box, remember?”

He said nothing; he was frowning.

I shook my head and drove. We were driving through farm country, now, that might well have been Illinois. I wished it were.

“Anne will know,” he said.

“What?”

“If it’s Charlie’s sleeping suit. Anne will know.”

I knew enough not to respond to that one.

We drove in silence again. I mulled a few things over that I didn’t share with him. How phony the German phrasing of the notes seemed to me, particularly in light of the Sicilian phrase—
statti citto
—in the phone call to Condon, and Condon’s own discovery of the Black Hand meaning of the “singnature” on the notes. This latest note again contained a suspicious number of correctly spelled, difficult words, among the misspelled smaller ones. And John in the cemetery used gangland phrases—“The boss would smack me out,” “drill us both.” I supposed a Scandinavian immigrant could have picked up such talk. But somehow it just didn’t ring true.

“The other day,” I said, breaking the silence as the black sky began turning gray, “you indicated there were other ‘parties,’ besides the professor, who might be in contact with the kidnappers. You wouldn’t want to let me in on any of that, would you?”

He didn’t hesitate in his response. “Actually, you should know. It involves your specialty: gangsters. It’s one of the reasons why I asked you to stick around.”

It seemed there was a socially prominent individual in Norfolk, Virginia, a certain Commodore John Hughes Curtis, who’d been approached by a bootlegger who claimed to be one of a gang of six who kidnapped Lindbergh’s son.

“Curtis is the president of one of the largest ship-building companies in the South,” Lindbergh said. “He has impeccable credentials—Admiral Burrage called me, in fact, to arrange a meeting between Curtis and myself.”

Now, added to the endless list of colonels, were an admiral and a commodore.

“Admiral Burrage,” Lindbergh explained almost defensively, reading my cynical expression no doubt, “was in command of the cruiser
Memphis,
the ship that brought me back from Paris.”

Back from his legendary solo transatlantic flight to Paris, he meant.