Vanishing Act (14 page)

“Where've you been?” Kelleher asked. “And where's Susan Carol?”

“She's working on something,” Stevie said. “And I was checking out tomorrow's schedule.”

“Well, don't check it too closely,” Kelleher said. “It's being changed.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because the SVR has agreed to release Nadia Symanova. Her parents just got a phone call. They left here with a police escort five minutes ago.”

“Really?! How do you know all this?” Stevie said.

“Arlen told me. He said the SVR is still denying it was involved. They're going to have a press conference for her tomorrow afternoon and she'll be the first match on Arthur Ashe tomorrow night. CBS is going to cancel its regular prime-time programming to show it. Carillo told me they're making a deal with USA Network right now. Nadia's become too big for cable TV.”

He shook his head. “The movie rights can't be far behind.”

Stevie almost gagged. “You don't know how right you are about that,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Sit down,” Stevie said. “I have a lot to tell you.”

14:
TRIUMPHANT RETURN

BOBBY KELLEHER'S
jaw kept dropping further and further as Stevie filled him in on all he and Susan Carol had seen and heard. He shook his head when Stevie described the meeting in the U.S. Open Club, and he said, “I feel for Susan Carol. That's got to be a jolt to see her uncle involved in this somehow.”

The question, they agreed, was what “this” was. They had no real proof that the Symanovs or Hughes Norwood or Brendan Gibson was involved in anything sinister. “For all we know, O'Donahue approached them and said, ‘If everything works out, there might be a movie in all this,'” Kelleher said.

“Do you believe that?” Stevie said.

“No,” Kelleher said. “If Hughes Norwood is involved, I always believe the worst. I think you're right. They already knew Nadia was okay when you saw them in the Open Club. They probably knew it earlier today. The question is, why did they hold it back? Supposedly they just now got the word and rushed out of here.”

Kelleher's cell phone was chirping. He looked at the number and smiled. “It's Susan Carol,” he said as he answered. He listened for a moment, nodding his head.

“No,” he said. “I wouldn't push it any further than that. Come on back here and we'll figure out what we want to do tomorrow.”

He closed the phone. “Did she find O'Donahue?” Stevie asked.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I guess she gave him a wide-eyed ‘I can't believe I'm meeting a famous director' routine.”

“I've seen that routine,” Stevie said. “It's very good.”

“I guess it is,” Kelleher said. “O'Donahue told her that he's been here all week because Hughes Norwood invited him to come to the tournament as his guest. He says they've done business before. She gave him a sort of breathless ‘Are you gonna do a movie on Nadia Symanova if they find her?' And he said, ‘Don't worry, sweetheart, they'll find her.'”

“What did you tell her not to push too far?”

“She was thinking of trying to talk to her uncle, but I told her that wasn't a good idea right now. She needs to cool down first.”

Stevie's mind was racing. “What do you think this is all about?” he said to Kelleher. “Would the Symanovs really try to turn their daughter's kidnapping into something they could make money on?”

Kelleher shrugged. “These are tennis people,” he said. “Their number one advisor is Hughes Norwood. I wouldn't put anything past them.”

“Okay, but it still seems fast—they barely know she's safe and already they're making movie deals? And I'm still not convinced it was the SVR that did this. They've just been too forthcoming about that.”

“A skeptic after my own heart,” Kelleher said. “Susan Carol's not the only smart one on the team of Anderson and Thomas.”

The good news for Stevie was that the apartment Kelleher and Mearns were staying in had two bedrooms and they were both amenable to his staying with them, given that he was no longer welcome at 52 Riverside Drive.

Susan Carol came back to the pressroom and quickly wrote a very straight story on the day's match results for her paper. The only upset had been Lleyton Hewitt, the onetime Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion who had been beaten by a guy named Paradorn Srichaphan.

“Spell that three times fast,” Tamara Mearns said as she sat next to Susan Carol, writing her own story.

Kelleher gave Stevie the day off. “You might have a lot to do tomorrow,” he said.

Kelleher had written an early column on the strange press conference, staying away from speculation because it was just too dangerous at this point. “You imply for one second that the Symanovs are anything but victims right now and you not only might have a lawsuit thrown at you, but you will make all your readers very angry,” he said. “No sense messing around until we know more.”

When he and Susan Carol and Mearns were finished writing, Kelleher drove them all back into Manhattan. Susan Carol called her uncle and was told he wouldn't be home until late. So they swung by his apartment so Stevie could pack his things and then they all went out for dinner. Kelleher asked if pizza was okay with everyone and drove to a place on the East Side called John's Pizza. It was even better than the pizza they'd had on Sunday—which already felt like a lifetime ago to Stevie. He ate six slices.

“You are going to gain ten pounds before you get home,” Susan Carol said.

“That's okay, I can afford it,” he said.

Kelleher groaned. “Oh, to be thirteen again,” he said.

After dinner, Susan Carol insisted she didn't need to be driven back crosstown. “Just put me in a cab,” she said.

Stevie walked her to the corner where she could catch a cab headed west while Kelleher and Mearns went to retrieve their car. “We'll swing around and pick you up,” Kelleher told Stevie.

As they stood on the corner, Stevie felt a tug of sadness.

“I'm really sorry this is happening,” he said.

“I know you are,” she said. He could see that her eyes were glistening just a little bit. “Don't worry, it'll be fine in the end.”

She whistled and a cab skidded to a halt in front of them. “Promise you'll call my cell as soon as you get inside the apartment,” he said.

She patted him on the shoulder. “I'll be fine.”

“Promise.”

This time she put her arm around him. “I promise. Remember, Stevie, tomorrow is another day.”

“Scarlett…”

She jumped into the cab before he could say another word. The cab pulled away just as Kelleher pulled up.

Stevie's new room appeared to belong to a child of about four. But it had plenty of room—and lots of toys. He dropped his bag and walked back into the living room to find Kelleher and Mearns watching the opening for
SportsCenter.
The lead story, according to Dan Patrick, was that the USTA had called an eleven a.m. press conference for the next day, “fueling speculation that Nadia Symanova has been found. The question is, what kind of condition is she in? ESPN's Luke Jensen reports that the Symanov family and the SVR have been in negotiations since last Monday when Symanova disappeared.”

Kelleher groaned. “This is why I hate ESPN,” he said. “Every news outlet in the country has been reporting for two days that Symanova was kidnapped by the SVR and they act as if they have a scoop.”

Stevie wanted to stay up and talk, but he was out on his feet. He set the alarm for eight o'clock and was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. About five minutes later, or so it seemed, the alarm was going off. He got up, took a shower, and found Kelleher and Mearns sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee. “Want me to make you some eggs?” Kelleher offered.

“No thanks,” he said. “Cereal's fine.”

“You should think about the eggs,” Mearns said. “Bobby's actually a pretty good cook. Sunny-side up is his specialty.”

He settled for cereal and had just finished when the apartment buzzer sounded. It was Susan Carol, who was waiting in the lobby. They went downstairs to meet her and walked outside to wait for the car. Stevie was amazed—as always—by how much traffic there was in Manhattan. But it was a beautiful morning, the weather had cooled off considerably, and there was a slight snap of fall in the air.

“How'd it go with your uncle last night?” he asked Susan Carol while they waited.

“Not great,” she said. “He wanted to know where you'd come up with the idea that he was some kind of criminal. I told him that you'd really been thrown by the Makarovs being in the apartment. I told him you just overreacted and you were sorry. He went into this long explanation about how dirty the agenting business could be.”

“Apparently he's fitting right in,” Mearns said as the car pulled up, causing Susan Carol to look a little bit ill.

“You didn't say anything about seeing him in the U.S. Open Club, did you?” Stevie said as they climbed into the backseat.

She gave him a withering look, and he put up a hand to say, “Question withdrawn.”

The Midtown Tunnel was surprisingly empty so the trip was short. But by the time they pulled into the parking lot, everyone had an assignment: Susan Carol and Tamara were going to hang out in the U.S. Open Club—Kelleher said he thought he could get Mearns a pass from Kantarian—while Kelleher worked the players' lounge to see who was there and what the talk was, especially if Nadia Symanova made a splashy return at the press conference. Stevie's assignment was to talk to Evelyn Rubin after her match—win or lose.

The pressroom was buzzing when they walked in. Everyone had a different theory on what was going to happen at the press conference. “You heard what they're doing, didn't you?” Bud Collins said as they were putting their computers down. “There's not enough room for all the media in the interview room, so they're setting up a podium and chairs on one of the practice courts.”

“Will that mean all the fans get to stand around and watch?” Susan Carol asked. “Won't that be a circus?”

“Exactly, my dear,” Collins said. “I'm sure that's exactly what the USTA wants. Can you imagine the TV rating they're going to get when she plays tonight?”

“I'm not sure it's just the USTA that wants a circus,” Stevie said quietly to Susan Carol.

“Good point,” she said.

They decided to leave early to walk over to practice court 7. That turned out to be a smart decision. A ring of security had been set up to keep people from getting to the walkway behind the practice courts. Their credentials got them through, but they had to wait because the guards were checking people's passes very thoroughly. As usual, Stevie got the double and triple look at his credential. “He's my assistant,” Kelleher said. The guard raised an eyebrow but said nothing and let them through without any hassle.

A podium had been set up at one end of the court. There were rows of chairs all the way back to the net, and behind that was an even larger podium that was jam-packed with cameras and their crews. As it got close to eleven o'clock, they could hear the whir of helicopters overhead. “I haven't seen anything like this since the O.J. chase,” Mearns said.

By 11:10, a USTA PR guy was demanding that everyone take seats, and even from a distance, they could sense that an entourage of people was moving toward the court. “Reminds me of the posse in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
” Kelleher said, bringing up a famous old movie Stevie had watched with his dad. “You can see them coming from miles away.”

The posse entered through a side gate near the podium. Stevie tried to count the security people as they poured in—some in suits with earpieces, some in the blue shirts worn by the USTA security people—and gave up when he got to eighteen. In the midst of all of them, Stevie could see Arlen Kantarian, Mr. and Mrs. Symanov, Hughes Norwood, and last but certainly not least, Nadia Symanova. As soon as the fans spotted her, they began to clap and cheer and call out her name: “Nadia! Nadia!” The noise built as they came through the gate and people could see her clearly as she followed her father onto the podium. She was dressed more like a model than a tennis player, in a short blue dress and high-heeled sandals.

“She must be eight feet tall in those shoes,” Stevie said to Susan Carol.

“Don't make fun of tall girls,” Susan Carol said. “But you're right.”

The posse sat in chairs next to the podium and Kantarian walked to the microphone to get things started. There was still a lot of noise from the fans and hundreds of cameras clicking and whirring as Symanova sat down and crossed her legs. She had a broad smile on her face and was waving to people, even blowing kisses at a few particularly amorous fans.
“Marry me, Nadia!”
one of them screamed.

Kantarian, now at the microphone, picked up on that quickly, saying, “No proposals this morning.”

Everyone laughed. Kantarian settled into the script that was apparently in front of him. “We're here this morning to celebrate,” he said. “As you can all see, Nadia Symanova has been returned safely to her family and to the family that is the world of tennis.”

“Oh God, the family of tennis,” Mearns said. “Be sure to write that down.”

Kantarian went on for several minutes: they could not share details of Nadia's ordeal, he said, because the FBI still considered it an open case. No ransom had been paid. He knew there had been speculation that the Russian SVR had been responsible for her kidnapping but they could not confirm or deny that. What mattered, he said, was that she was safe and “this nightmare is now over and we can go on with this wonderful tournament with Nadia very much a part of it.” He announced that her first-round match would be played on Arthur Ashe Stadium court that night at eight o'clock, the start moved back thirty minutes to accommodate CBS.

“What a surprise,” Kelleher murmured.