“When you gave him the pentothal—”
“Yes. There was more than pentothal in the needle.”
“I sensed something.”
“So you said.”
“But I never would have guessed—”
“No. Of course not.”
Gershon Meir shuddered. “When he realizes what you did to him and how you did it—”
“Then what?” Grodin spread his hands. “Could he be more utterly our enemy than he is already? And I honestly don’t think he’ll guess how he was tricked. He’ll most likely suppose he was exposed to rabies from an animal source. I understand you can get it from inhaling the vapors of the dung of rabid bats. Perhaps he’ll hide out in a bat-infested cave and blame the bats for his illness. But it doesn’t matter, Gershon. Let him know what I did to him. I almost hope he guesses, for all the good it will do him.”
“God.”
“I just wanted to tell you,” Grodin said, his voice calmer now. “There’s poetry to it, don’t you think? He’s walking around now like a time bomb. He could get the Pasteur shots and save himself, but he doesn’t know that, and by the time he does—”
“God.”
“Start the car, eh? We’d better be getting back.” And the older man straightened up in his seat and rubbed the throbbing knuckles of his right hand. They ached, but all the same he was smiling.
The Most Unusual Snatch
They grabbed Carole Butler a few minutes before midnight just a block and a half from her own front door. It never would have happened if her father had let her take the car. But she was six months shy of eighteen, and the law said you had to be eighteen to drive at night, and her father was a great believer in the law. So she had taken the bus, got off two blocks from her house, and walked half a block before a tall thin man with his hat down over his eyes appeared suddenly and asked her the time.
She was about to tell him to go buy his own watch when an arm came around her from behind and a damp cloth fastened over her mouth and nose. It smelled like a hospital room.
She heard voices, faintly, as if from far away. “Not too long, you don’t want to kill her.”
“What’s the difference? Kill her now or kill her later, she’s just as dead.”
“You kill her now and she can’t make the phone call.”
There was more, but she didn’t hear it. The chloroform did its work and she sagged, limp, unconscious.
At first, when she came to, groggy and weak and sick to her stomach, she thought she had been taken to a hospital. Then she realized it was just the smell of the chloroform. Her head seemed awash in the stuff. She breathed steadily, in and out, in and out, stayed where she was, and didn’t open her eyes.
She heard the same two voices she had heard before. One was assuring the other that everything would go right on schedule, that they couldn’t miss. “Seventy-five thou,” he said several times. “Wait another hour, let him sweat a little. Then call him and tell him it’ll cost him seventy-five thou to see his darling daughter again. That’s all we tell him, just that we got her, and the price. Then we let him stew in it for another two hours.”
“Why drag it out?”
“Because it has to drag until morning anyway. He’s not going to have that kind of bread around the house. He’ll have to go on the send for it, and that means nine o’clock when the banks open. Give him the whole message right away and he’ll have too much time to get nervous and call copper. But space it out just right and we’ll have him on the string until morning, and then he can go straight to the bank and get the money ready.”
Carole opened her eyes slowly, carefully. The one who was doing most of the talking was the same tall thin man who had asked her the time. He was less than beautiful, she noticed. His nose was lopsided, angling off to the left as though it had been broken and improperly reset. His chin was scarcely there at all. He ought to wear a goatee, she thought. He would still be no thing of beauty, but it might help.
The other one was shorter, heavier, and younger, no more than ten years older than Carole. He had wide shoulders, close-set eyes, and a generally stupid face, but he wasn’t altogether bad-looking. Not bad at all she told herself. Between the two of them, they seemed to have kidnapped her. She wanted to laugh out loud.
“Better cool it,” the younger one said. “Looks like she’s coming out of it.”
She picked up her cue, making a great show of blinking her eyes vacantly and yawning and stretching. Stretching was difficult, as she seemed to be tied to a chair. It was an odd sensation. She had never been tied up before, and she didn’t care for it.
“Hey,” she said, “where am I?”
She could have answered the question herself. She was, to judge from appearances, in an especially squalid shack. The shack itself was fairly close to a highway, judging from the traffic noises. If she had to guess, she would place the location somewhere below the southern edge of the city, probably a few hundred yards off Highway 130 near the river. There were plenty of empty fishing shacks there, she remembered, and it was a fair bet that this was one of them.
“Now just take it easy, Carole,” the thin man said. “You take it easy and nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“You kidnapped me.”
“You just take it easy and—”
She squealed with joy. “This is too much! You’ve actually kidnapped me. Oh, this is wild! Did you call my old man yet?”
“No.”
“Will you let me listen when you do?” She started to giggle. “I’d give anything to see his face when you tell him. He’ll split. He’ll just fall apart.”
They were both staring at her, open-mouthed. The younger man said, “You sound happy about it.”
“Happy? Of course I’m happy. This is the most exciting thing that ever happened to me!”
“But your father—”
“I hope you gouge him good,” she went on. “He’s the cheapest old man on earth. He wouldn’t pay a nickel to see a man go over the Falls. How much are you going to ask?”
“Never mind,” the thin man said.
“I just hope it’s enough. He can afford plenty.”
The thin man grinned. “How does seventy-five thousand dollars strike you?”
“Not enough. He can afford more than that,” she said. “He’s very rich, but you wouldn’t know it the way he hangs onto his money.”
“Seventy-five thou is pretty rich.”
She shook her head. “Not for him. He could afford plenty more.”
“It’s not what he can afford, it’s what he can raise in a hurry. We don’t want to drag this out for days. We want it over by morning.”
She thought for a minute. “Well, it’s your funeral,” she said pertly.
The shorter man approached her. “What do you mean by that?”
“Forget it, Ray,” his partner said.
“No, I want to find out. What did you mean by that, honey?”
She looked up at them. “Well, I don’t want to tell you your business,” she said slowly. “I mean, you’re the kidnappers. You’re the ones who are taking all the chances. I mean, if you get caught they can really give you a hard time, can’t they?”
“The chair,” the thin man said.
“That’s what I thought, so I don’t want to tell you how to do all this, but there was something that occurred to me.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s a good idea to wait for morning. You wouldn’t know it, of course, but he doesn’t have to wait until the banks open. He’s a doctor, and I know he gets paid in cash a lot of the time — cash that never goes to the bank, never gets entered in the books. It goes straight into the safe in the basement and stays there.”