“The baby is not dead,” the man had said with reassuring matter-of-factness. “Would I burn if the baby is not dead?”
“I’m a teacher, sir, not a lawyer. Is the child well?”
“The baby is better than it was. We give more for him to eat than we heard in the paper from Mrs. Lindbergh. Tell her not to worry. Tell the Colonel not to worry, either. Baby is all right.”
“How do I know I am talking to the right man?”
“You got it, the letter with my singnature. Same singnature that was on my note in the crib.”
Here I interrupted Condon again to say: “But it wasn’t in the crib-it was on the windowsill.”
Condon gestured dismissively. “That small discrepancy is negligible, compared to the confirmation I did receive.”
Seated on the bench with his “guest,” Condon had removed from his pocket a small canvas pouch, opened it and extracted the safety pins he’d taken from the Lindbergh nursery.
“What are these?” Condon asked.
“Pins from the baby’s crib.”
I shook my head hearing this, as Condon said to me, “And thus I proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was indeed talking to the man who stood in the nursery and lifted that child from his crib!”
“Professor,” I said, “it doesn’t take a genius to identify safety pins as coming from a baby’s crib.”
“But these were identified as being from the Lindbergh baby’s crib!”
“Yeah, right. He might’ve guessed Baby Snooks, instead. Go on, go on.”
Condon had asked the man his name.
“John,” he’d said.
“My name is John, too. Where are you from, John?”
“Up farther than Boston.”
“What do you do, John?”
“I’m a sailor.”
“Bist du Deutsche?”
Condon’s question got only a puzzled look in return; the professor asked again, in English.
“Are you German?”
“No,” John said. “I’m Scandinavian.”
Condon then took time to explain to John that his (that is, John’s) mother, if she were still alive, would no doubt disapprove of these sordid activities. Then, because it was cold, Condon wasted even more time trying to convince his “guest”-who had a bad cough-to take his (that is, Condon’s) topcoat.
The baby, John told the professor, was on a boat (“boad,” he pronounced it). The boat was six hours away and could be identified by two white cloths on its masts. The ransom had been upped to seventy thousand because Lindbergh had disobeyed instructions and brought in the cops; besides, the kidnappers needed to put money aside in case they needed lawyers. The kidnap gang numbered six, two of whom were “womens.” John’s boss was “Number One,” a “smart man” who worked for the government. Number One would receive twenty grand of the seventy sought, and John and the other two men and the two nurses would each receive ten grand.
“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.
14
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.