His fingers slowed, but he kept unpeeling gauze.
“What if the kidnappers ring up the nurses’ station instead of the house? If you rush home to RuthClaire, there’ll be nobody here to take their call—nobody who can respond to their demands.” I was improvising, but the possibility sounded realistic to me. “You couldn’t talk to them, of course, but you could authorize me to act as spokesman. Think about it, Adam. Somebody has to be here.”
He shrugged my hand away and finished taking off his bandages. I looked at him in profile. His nose seemed less flat, his cheekbones higher, his chin more pronounced. Not only had the plastic surgeons reconstructed his buccal cavity, they’d given his entire face a modern configuration. None of the changes was severe or blatant, but together they gave him a streamlined, Nilotic handsomeness.
Adam dismounted his stool so that I towered over him again, embarrassed by my moronic tallness. From a hamper he seized a pair of clean white towels, which he folded double and spread out on the floor by the bed. He nodded me down. I knelt on one of the towels, and he, of course, knelt on the other, turning me back into Goliath to his humble shepherd boy.
But, side by side, we prayed. Or, Adam prayed while I knelt beside him with my brow pressed against the mattress edge. “Pray without ceasing,” it says in Thessalonians, but I couldn’t get past the part about forgiving-our-trespasses-as-we-forgive-those-who-trespass, etc., without thinking about Nancy’s perfidy, Caroline’s presumption that the kidnapping was a publicity stunt, or my need to resume my responsibilities at the West Bank. Pray without ceasing? I could do no better than an intermittent, “Don’t let the bastards kill him, God,” between which times I fantasized slitting Craig’s throat, taking Caroline to bed, and catering the reception of a wedding party at Muscadine Gardens—not necessarily in that order or all at once. My knees got sore, my kidneys ached, but somehow I shared Adam’s vigil on the floor for almost three hours.
At 3:57 A.M.—I checked my watch—the nurse came to the door to report that Adam had a telephone call.
“I tried to tell him that this was an absurd hour to call,” she said, “but he told me if I didn’t fetch Mr. Montaraz, I’d ‘live to regret it.’”
“It’s Puddicombe,” I whispered. Aloud I said, “We’ll be down there in two minutes. Go back and tell him.” My heart leapt against my rib cage. Too often, the parents of stolen children hear nothing from the abductors. A break like this one—a break I’d desperately anticipated—was a kind of sardonic miracle.
The nurse left. I banged my forehead against the mattress in despairing joy. The son of a bitch had telephoned! I rocked back on my heels and mouthed a silent thank you. Adam touched my shoulder.
“God. Bless. You,” he managed.
I gaped at him. Adam had spoken, and never had I heard a voice so oddly pitched and modulated: a scratchy computer struggling to sound human. Impulsively, I hugged the little man. Holding him at arm’s length, I told him he’d better put on a pair of pants. If we were too long getting to the nurses’ station, Puddicombe—or whoever it was—would get antsy about the delay and hang up. I rubbed two fingers along the side of my nose. They came away wet.
A pair of khaki trousers his only clothing, Adam accompanied me to the nurses’ station. The duty nurse waited for us with her hand over the telephone mouthpiece.
“Is there an extension?” I said.
She nodded at the glass-walled office behind the counter. “In there. If you want to, you can cradle the receiver on a speaker device, and it’ll broadcast like a radio.”
“Good,” I said. “You don’t happen to have a tape recorder too, do you?”
“Another nurse, Andrea, has a jam box, a big silver thing she hauls around to deafen her elders with. It also records. Andrea leaves her tapes in the drawer. You can tape over one of those—if you take responsibility for ruining a favorite of hers.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
At which point the nurse realized that Adam’s face was free of its bandages. “Oh, my God! Those weren’t supposed to come off yet. Dr. Ruggiero will flay me alive.”
“No, he won’t,” I said. “Mr. Montaraz is healing nicely.”
I led Adam into the office, found the jam box, rummaged up an unmarked tape, put it in the machine, and pressed the record button. Then I set the telephone receiver into the amplifier unit and depressed the lighted button on the base of the telephone. The nurse, having observed all this through the glass, hung up her phone and left to make a tour of the floor—efficient and discreet, that good woman.
“We’re here,” I told the caller.
“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked, two syllables that identified him: Craig Puddicombe. He had made no effort to disguise his voice. (If the restaurant business ever got too tame for me, maybe I could go into police work.)
I told Craig who I was.
“The first dude in history to let a hibber snake his old lady.”
“We were divorced when RuthClaire married Adam.”
“Yeah. You even played pimp for ’em, didn’t you? Now you’re in the hospital holding the hibber’s hand. Jesus, Mr. Loyd, you take the cake.”
“But you and Nancy took the child. What do you—?”
Puddicombe broke in: “Get your tape recorders all set up? Get a call off to the police? That why you took so goddamn long pickin’ up the phone?”
“Adam had to dress. His room’s at the far—”
“Stuff that, Mr. Loyd.” He said something to somebody in the room with him, but it was all muffled, indistinct. Then: “Prove to me the hibber’s really there.”
“How? You know he can’t talk.”
“He can sing, can’t he? He can hum like a rotary engine.”
“Craig, he’s had an operation. His face is bandaged. The entire lower portion of his face was remodeled.”
“He’ll still be stump-ugly to me. Have him hum through his bandages.”
I started to protest, but Adam took my handkerchief from my coat pocket, tied it around his face as a bandanna, and stepped to the amplifier to hum a Cokesbury hymn.
“That’s the hibber, all right—a mule brayin’ into a barrel.”
“Prove you’ve got Tiny Paul,” I said.
“How? You wanna hear him scream?”
Adam stopped humming—half lament, half yodel—and removed the bandanna. He shook his head in response to Craig’s last question.
“Never mind,” I said. “What do you want?”
“A ransom. If Mister and Missus Hibber give it to us, they’ll get their filthy little whatever-it-is back.”
“How much money, Craig?”
“Who said anything about money?”
This reply shocked me. What sort of ransom required no monetary payoff?
“Y’all still there?” Craig asked.
“Tell us your terms. We’re listening.”
Craig consulted with his accomplice. Then, as if reading from a script, he said, “We don’t want money. We don’t do violence. What we want is what’s right. You may think the brat’s been taken because his hibber daddy killed E. L. You may think we covet what the brat’s unnatural family has built up for itself since the hibber did that killin’. It ain’t so, though, neither of those things. We took the brat to make some undone justice get done. We took him to set some wrong things right.”
This nonsense scared me. “Come on, Craig, get to the point.”
“Have a little patience,” the amplifier said, mockingly polite. A paper rattled. “You get your little half-breed back if and when you do the following. First, Mister and Missus Hibber they stop livin’ together. Second, they tell the papers and the TV they’ve stopped and they regret the sinful example they’ve set decent whites and blacks all over the world by bringin’ their mongrel brat into it. Third, they—”