The Kidnappers (11 page)

Willie gazed at me for a moment, then decided to reveal his superior knowledge. “The man who lives here, Mr. Zoulas, is in Paris for the rest of the month. One of the kidnappers—the tall one who dresses in suits—is a personal secretary for him. His name is Studen. The other one, Tedesco, is somebody's chauffeur. I think he used to work for Mr. Zoulas, but he got fired. Now he drives for a Mrs. Civen. She's gone, too, to Miami. Between them, they have the use of this apartment for a couple of weeks and longer than that for Mrs. Civen's car. So they decided it would be a good time to kidnap some rich kid, for the ransom, and stash him here where nobody would think to look. Until the ransom's paid, that is.”

“But then what? Everybody knows what they look like,” I objected. “You would know even if I hadn't seen that what's-his-name, Tedesco? So how can they let you go?”

Willie stared at me as if he'd never thought of this possibility. “My dad will pay the money, and then they have to let me go,” he stated.

“Why will they? What are they going to do, take you home so you can tell the police everything and they can catch the kidnappers? So you can swear in court they're the ones who did it, so they'll be sent to prison forever? Why would they do that?” Seeing that he still didn't quite grasp what I was getting at, I added, “As far as I know, there aren't any rules for kidnappers. They do whatever they think they can get away with. They do expect to get away with this, don't they? At the very least, they'll need time to escape, out of the country, maybe, after they've collected the ransom. Turning you loose will make it harder for them, so why should they do it?”

It was clear from Willie's face that I'd brought up some unwelcome ideas. “They said all I had to do was sit tight until my dad forks over the money, and then I'd be all right.”

“And you believed whatever they said? You think guys who would kidnap a kid and extort money from his family would stop at telling a lie or two to keep you quiet?”

He was frowning deeply now. “If they're not going to turn me loose, what are they going to do with me?”

“And with me,” I reminded him. “I'm here, too. I don't know, but I'm sure they don't want to be caught. What if your father can't pay the ransom they're asking for?”

“He can pay it. I'm his only son, and he'll pay whatever they ask for.”

“Well, I don't know if my father will get a ransom demand, too, or not. And I don't know how he'd raise a lot of cash on a Saturday. Or maybe they don't intend to ask for money for me. Maybe . . .” I stopped, swallowed, and realized I was scaring myself as much as I was scaring him.

“Maybe what?” Willie asked with a tremor in his voice.

“Maybe they don't intend ever to send us home . . . alive.”

Willie sat very still and got redder and redder. Then all the color washed out of his face and he was so pale I wondered if he was going to faint. I felt like fainting myself.

What if the kidnappers
didn't
intend to let us go? Ever?

We looked at each other, not speaking for a minute or so.

It was a nice room. As nice as our apartment. The other rooms had been nice, too. A comfortable home. I began to remember things I'd seen as I passed through the living room.

A Mr. Zoulas lived here, but he was in Paris now. He thought he could trust his secretary, the man called Studen, and he'd left his home for the man to take care of. Mr. Zoulas collected things: paintings, and different kinds of wood carvings that had maybe come from Africa and India, and books. He had hundreds of books.

There were some of his collected items in here. A bookcase that held quite a few books, and an elephant carved from some kind of dark glossy wood, and a running horse with a flowing mane, of an even darker wood.

There was a telephone jack, but no phone.

Willie saw me looking at it, and finally spoke. “They took it away. So I couldn't call for help, of course.”

“Yeah. Do they ever give you a chance to get out of this room? There must be another phone somewhere.”

“There is, because I've heard one ring. But the only place they've let me go is to the bathroom.” He jerked a thumb toward a door across the room.

“What's in there? Anything useful?” I got up and walked over to check it out. Some people had phones in their bathrooms, but this place didn't. Just the standard kind of things people put in their guest bathrooms. I tried the door into the hallway, but it was locked.

Willie had come to stand behind me in the doorway. “Nothing to help me escape,” he said.

“Have they fed you?” I turned around to face him.

“Sure. Mostly junk my mom won't let me eat. I don't think either of them can cook.”

“At least you're not going hungry. I imagined you going hungry.”

“And being tortured. You said you thought about me being tortured.” He wasn't looking all that friendly. “How come you imagined me being tortured?”

“It just seemed like the kind of thing kidnappers might do. It was pretty scary, watching you get dragged into that car, and I didn't know what to do about it.”

“You could have given the police the license number.”

“I didn't see it. I didn't get outside until the car was too far away.” Facing in a different direction, I saw something else. “You've got books and a TV in here. That's better than a dungeon.”

“Where would anybody find a dungeon in a modern city?” Willie said. “The books are all stupid. About hydraulic mining and archaeology and medical research. Who wants to read about that kind of stuff?”

“They might be interesting,” I observed, thinking that maybe it was Willie who was stupid, not the books. My father had all kinds of books on technical things in his study, and I'd looked at some of them.

Willie walked over and turned on the TV. “I can't believe there's nothing on TV about me. Maybe you didn't have it on the right station.”

I stood watching while he changed channels, looking for a newscast. The only one he could find was mostly international news and football scores. No police sketch of the man named Tedesco.

I sat down in the only easy chair in the room, wondering if they'd missed me yet at home. How long would Sophie and Pink wait for me to come back? Or would it be Mark who got annoyed because I hadn't brought the math book yet?

Where was the math book? I'd dropped it in the elevator. Had the man named Studen picked it up, or was it still there, where someone would find it?

It would be Sophie, I decided, who'd get worried enough to go to Mom and Father and report that I was missing. It would probably spoil the party. My mother would be very upset. I wasn't sure if my father would be upset or angry. Probably a little of each.

I felt sorry for Mom because she'd worked hard to make it a good party. What would they do with all that food if they had to send the guests home?

Mark says I'm the kind of person who doesn't know when to keep quiet. Maybe this was one of those times, but I felt compelled to talk.

“I've been gone long enough so someone's sure to miss me by now,” I said. “My father told me not to go outside, and my brother and sister and Pink know I was only going down to the sixth floor to get Mark a math book. So maybe they'll realize I'm still in the building. Maybe they'll check out the whole place and find us.”

“All anybody'd have to do,” Willie pointed out, “is deny we were in the apartment. Unless they get warrants for every apartment in the building, they can't get in and look around.”

I scrutinized the ordinary furnishings of the room. “What have you tried so far?”

“Yelling, when they first grabbed me. So they gagged me when they brought me up in the service elevator, in case somebody was around. They locked me in here with a key, but they didn't leave it in the lock. And they haven't given me a newspaper so I could push it under the door and knock a key out onto it, to pull it back to me. The carpet's right at the bottom of the door, so that wouldn't have worked anyway. And I think at least one of them's been here all the time, keeping an eye on me.”

“If there's only one man here, and we could get him to open the door for some reason, maybe the two of us could jump him,” I suggested.

“Tedesco, the one with the earring, is really strong,” Willie said. “I doubt if we could overpower him. If he comes in, though, we can try it.”

“We need to attract attention from someone else. Somehow,” I said.

“Like building a fire in the wastebasket? Making a lot of smoke? I thought of that. Except I don't have any matches. And I'd probably die of smoke inhalation before anyone even noticed what was going on.”

“I wonder how long it would take,” I said thoughtfully, “if we filled the bathtub and let it run over, before it leaked through the ceiling and somebody noticed it on the next floor down? They'd investigate that, for sure.”

“It would probably run under the door into the hallway before it went through the floor. They'd come and stop us. Studen is using the room right next to this one, so he'd be down the hallway often enough to catch us.”

“Mark says I'm always being irritating, to get attention.” I walked to the window and looked out.

“I'll testify to that,” Willie agreed.

I turned my head to look at him, unable to decide if he was looking really mean or not. “I never meant to hit you in the nose and make it bleed,” I told him.

“It hurt,” Willie said. “It hurt a lot.”

“You still want to beat me up?” I asked.

“Not until after we get out of here,” Willie conceded. And then, at the same time, we both started to laugh.

It didn't last long, though, because there was nothing funny about our predicament. I was afraid that what I'd suggested was true; even if Mr. Groves paid a big ransom, they wouldn't let us go for fear it would lessen their chances to get away.

“Well,” I said finally, “if we can't figure a way to get out, we'll have to figure a way to get someone else to come in. Forcibly, if they have to. We've ruled out setting a fire or causing a flood. So what else is there?”

“You're the one with the imagination. I remember that tall story you told Mr. Epperson about what happened to your essay on Shakespeare. I thought he was going to give you an A just for being so inventive, even if he didn't believe you. So
you
tell
me
.”

I looked out the window again. “It just happens that I really did leave the paper on the kitchen table, and it stuck to the bottom of that pan of cinnamon rolls Junie was making, and she put it in the oven and it caught fire. And when I rewrote it, he marked it down to a B because it was a day late.” I pressed my face against the glass. “There are hundreds of people down there. They'd probably help us if they knew about us.”

“The window won't open. I tried it,” Willie said.

“How about the one in the bathroom? Is that sealed shut, too?”

“Yes. I tried to break it by hammering on it with the end of a plunger I found under the sink in the bathroom, but the glass wouldn't break. And Tedesco heard me banging and came and took away the plunger.”

“So we can't drop notes on anybody below.” I stared across the street, at the next apartment building. It was a Saturday night. Many of the windows were dark. People had gone out to dinner or the movies or to a concert or something.

Yet there were a few lights on. Directly across from us an old lady sat in the window. Not looking at us, but down at something on a table in front of her, maybe doing a crossword puzzle. I waved my hands around, but she didn't look up. People in the city don't pay much attention to what's going on in windows across the street.

One level down, a guy in his undershirt looked as if he might be watching television. He had a can in one hand, and as I watched he lifted it to take a swig.

Two windows over, on that same level, a young man was working at a computer. He had a can beside him, too.

None of them so much as glanced my way.

If only one of our own windows was visible from here! Of course Mark and Sophie and Pink might not even be in the rooms on this side of the building now; if everybody had missed me, they might be in a panic, trying to find me.

Far below, a police car passed the intersection, sandwiched between yellow taxis. The police officer in it had probably seen Tedesco's picture, probably knew Willie had been kidnapped, maybe by this time even knew that
I
had disappeared.

If I were writing this as a story, I'd have figured out a way to escape.

And then I thought of something.

“Is there a mirror in the bathroom?”

“One on the front of the medicine chest,” Willie offered. “What good will that do us?”

“Is it one we could pry off? Take screws out of the door or something, and get it apart so we could bring the mirror part in here? My mom used to say that when I was four I could take anything apart, including things she'd just told me didn't
come
apart. I took all the doohickeys off the backs of clocks for years, until I finally got shocked taking apart an electric digital. I didn't trust clocks after that.”

Willie went into the bathroom and I followed him. He was inspecting the mirror on the medicine chest door. “I don't see how we'd get it apart. It takes a Phillips screwdriver even to get the hinges off the door, and the mirror seems to be made right into the door before they put the pieces of it together.”

We looked around for something to use as a screwdriver, and found nothing that would work even on an ordinary screw.

In the apartment beyond the bathroom door, the telephone rang.

We stopped moving, then ran to put our ears against the door, hoping to be able to hear something. There was a murmuring of a man's voice, but we couldn't make out the words.