A Walk Among the Tombstones (29 page)

He hadn't even thought about the daughter. Still, he'd made the call, and Landau had taken it as confirmation of a course of action he had adopted when he'd first sent Lucia off to Chichester. Instead of letting her take subways or buses, he'd arranged to have a car service pick her up every morning at seven-thirty and collect her in front of Chichester every afternoon at a quarter to three. If she wanted to go to a friend's house the car service would take her there, and she was instructed to call them when she wanted to come home. If she wanted to go anywhere in the neighborhood, she usually took the dog with her.

The dog was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, and actually very gentle, but looked ferocious enough to constitute a powerful deterrent.

Early that afternoon, the telephone rang in the office of Chichester Academy. A well-spoken gentleman explained that he was an assistant to Mr. Landau and was requesting that the school dismiss Ludmilla half an hour early because of a family emergency. "I've made arrangements with the car service," he assured the woman to whom he spoke, "and they'll have a vehicle waiting in front of the school at two-fifteen, although it probably will not be the car and driver she had this morning." And, he added, if there were any questions she was not to call Mr. Landau's residence; instead she could reach him, Mr. Pettibone, at a number he would give her now.

She didn't have to call the number, because there was no problem following his request. She summoned Lucia (no one at school knew her as Ludmilla) to the office and told her she would be dismissed early. At ten minutes after two the woman looked out the window and saw that a dark green truck or van was parked directly in front of the school's entrance on Pineapple Street. It was quite unlike the late-model GM

sedans that normally brought the girl in the morning and took her away in the afternoon, but it was clearly the right vehicle. The car service's name and address was plainly visible in white letters on its side.

Chaverim Livery Service, with an address on Ocean Avenue. And the driver, who walked around the truck so that he could hold the door for Lucia, wore a blue blazer the way they always did, and had one of those caps.

For her part, Lucia got into the van without hesitation. The driver closed the door, walked around the vehicle, got behind the wheel, and drove to the corner of Willow Street, at which point the woman stopped watching.

At a quarter to three the rest of the school was dismissed, and a few minutes later Lucia's regular driver showed up in the gray Oldsmobile Regency Brougham in which he had driven Lucia to school that morning. He waited patiently at the curb, knowing that Lucia was routinely as much as fifteen minutes late leaving the building. He would have waited that long and longer without complaint, but one of Lucia's classmates recognized him and told him he must have made a mistake.

"Because she was dismissed early," she said. "She got picked up like half an hour ago."

"Come on," he said, thinking she was playing a joke on him.

"It's true! Her father called the office and one of your cars already came and picked her up. Ask Miss Severance if you don't believe me."

The driver did not go in and confirm this with Miss Severance; if he had, that woman would almost certainly have called the Landau residence, and, quite possibly, the police. Instead he used his own car radio to call his dispatcher on Ocean Avenue and ask him what the hell was going on. "If she needed an early pickup," he said, "then you coulda sent me. Or if you can't get me, at least tell me to skip my regular pickup."

The dispatcher, of course, didn't know what the driver was talking about. When she got the gist of it she

figured out the only thing that made sense to her, that for some reason Landau had called another car service. She might have let it go at that. Maybe all their lines had been busy, maybe he'd been in a rush, maybe he'd picked the child up himself and hadn't been able to call off the scheduled car. But something evidently bothered her, because she looked up Yuri Landau's number and called him.

At first Yuri didn't get what all the fuss was about. So somebody at Chaverim made a mistake, and two cars went instead of one, and the second driver made the trip for nothing. How was that something to call him about? Then he began to realize that something out of the ordinary was going on. He got as much information as he could from the dispatcher, said he was sorry if there had been any inconvenience, and got her off the line.

Next he called the school, and when he spoke with Miss Severance and heard about the call from his assistant, Mr. Pettibone, there was really no question about it. Someone had managed to lure his daughter out of the school and into a van. Someone had kidnapped her.

At this point the Severance woman also figured it out, but Landau dissuaded her from calling the police.

It would be best handled privately, he said, improvising as he went along. "Relatives on her mother's side, extremely Orthodox, you could call them religious fanatics. They've been after me to pull her out of Chichester and send her to some crazy kosher school in Borough Park.

Don't worry about a thing, I'm sure she'll be back in your school tomorrow."

Then he hung up the phone and started to tremble.

They had his daughter. What did they want? He'd give them what they wanted, the bastards, he'd give them anything he had. But who were they? And what in God's name did they want?

Hadn't someone said something just a few weeks ago about a kidnapping?

He remembered, then, and called Kenan. Who called me.

* * *

YURI Landau had the penthouse apartment in a twelve-story brick co-op on Brightwater Court. In the

tiled lobby, two thick-bodied young Russians in tweed jackets and caps braced us as we entered. Peter ignored the uniformed doorman and told the others that his name was Khoury and Mr. Landau was expecting us. One of them rode up with us in the elevator.

By the time we got there, around four-thirty, Yuri had just received his first call from the kidnappers. He was still reacting to it. "A million dollars," he cried. "Where am I going to get a million dollars? Who's doing this, Kenan? Is it niggers? Is it those crazies from Jamaica?"

"It's white guys," Kenan said.

"My Luschka," he said. "How could this happen? What kind of a country is this?" He broke off when he saw us. "You're the brother," he said to Peter. "And you?"

"Matthew Scudder."

"You been working for Kenan. Good. Thanks to both of you for coming. But how did you get in? You walked right in? I had two men in the lobby, they were supposed to--" He caught sight of the man who had come up with us. "Oh, there you are, Dani, that's a good boy. Go back down to the lobby and keep an eye out." To no one in particular he said, "Now I post guards. The horse is stolen so I lock the barn.

For what? What can they take from me now? God took my wife, the dirty bastard, and these other bastards take my Luddy, my Luschka."

He turned to Kenan. "And if I post men downstairs from the time you called me, what good does it do? They get her out of school, they steal her away under everybody's nose. I wish I did what you did. You sent her out of the country, yes?"

Kenan and I looked at each other.

"What's this? You told me you sent your wife out of the country."

Kenan said, "That was the story we settled on, Yuri."

"Story? Why did you need a story? What happened?"

"She was kidnapped."

"Your wife."

"Yes."

"How much did they hit you for?"

"They asked a million. We negotiated, we settled on a lower figure."

"How much?"

"Four hundred thousand."

"And you paid the money? You got her back?"

"I paid."

"Kenan," he said. He took him by the shoulders. "Tell me, please.

You got her back, yes?"

"Dead," Kenan said.

"Oh, no," Yuri said. He reeled as if from a blow, threw up an arm to shield his face. "No," he said.

"Don't tell me that."

"Mr. Landau--"

He ignored me, took Kenan by the arm. "But you paid," he said.

"You gave them an honest count? You didn't try to chisel them?"

"I paid, Yuri. They killed her anyway."

His shoulders sagged. "Why?" he demanded, not of us but of that dirty bastard God who took his wife.

"Why?"

I stepped in and said, "Mr. Landau, these are very dangerous men, vicious and unpredictable. They've killed at least two women in addition to Mrs. Khoury. As things stand, they haven't got the slightest intention of releasing your daughter alive. I'm afraid there's a strong possibility that she's already dead."

"No."

"If she's alive we have a chance. But you have to decide how you want to handle this."

"What do you mean?"

"You could call the police."

"They said no cops."

"Naturally they'd say that."

"The last thing I want is cops here, poking into my life. As soon as I come up with the ransom money they'll want to know where it came from. But if it gets my daughter back... What do you think? We have a better chance if we call the cops?"

"You might have a better chance of catching the men who took her."

"To hell with that. What about getting her back?"

She's dead, I thought, but told myself that I didn't know it, and that he didn't have to hear it. I said, "I don't think police involvement at this stage would increase the chance of recovering your daughter alive. I think it might have the opposite effect. If the cops come in and the kidnappers know about it, they'll cut their losses and run. And they won't leave the girl alive."

"So fuck the cops. We'll do it ourselves. Now what?"

"Now I have to make a phone call."

"Go ahead. Wait, I want to keep the line open. They called, I talked with him, I had a million questions and he hung up on me. 'Stay off the line. We'll get back to you.' Use my daughter's phone, it's through that door. Kids, on the phone all the time, you could never reach the house. I had that other thing, Call Waiting, drove everybody crazy. All the time clicking in your ear, telling this one to hold on, you have to take a call.

Terrible. I got rid of it, got her her own phone, she could stay on it all she wanted. God, take anything I got, just give her back to me!"

I CALLED TJ's beeper and punched in the number on the Landau girl's Snoopy figural phone. Snoopy and Michael Jackson both seemed to play key roles in her personal mythology, judging from the room's decor. I paced, waiting for my call, and found a family photo on the white enamel dressing table, Yuri and a dark-haired woman and a girl with dark hair that fell past her shoulders in cascading ringlets. Lucia looked to be about ten in the photo. Another photo showed her alone, older, and looked to have been taken last June at graduation. Her hair was shorter in the more recent photo and her face looked serious and mature for her years.

The phone rang. I picked it up and he said, "Yo, who wants TJ?"

"It's Matt," I said.

"Hey, my man! What's goin', Owen?"

"Serious business," I said. "It's an emergency, and I need your help."

"You got it."

"Can you get hold of the Kongs?"

"You mean right away? They sometimes hard to reach. Jimmy Hong got a beeper, but he don't always have it with him."

"See if you can get him and give him this number."

"Sure. That's it?"

"No," I said. "Do you remember the laundromat we went to last week?"

"Sure."

"Do you know how to get there?"

"R train to Forty-fifth, a block to Fifth Avenue, four, five blocks to the wishee-washee."

"I didn't realize you were paying attention."

"Shit," he said. "Man, I allus payin' attention. I's attentive."

"Not just resourceful?"

"Attentive an' resourceful."

"Can you get out there right away?"

"Right now? Or call the Kongs first?"

"Call them, then go. Are you near the subway?"

"Man, I always be near the subway. I talkin' to you on the phone the Kongs liberated, Forty-third an'

Eighth."

"Call me as soon as you get out there."

" 'Kay. Somethin' big goin' down, huh?"

"Very big," I said.

I LEFT the bedroom door open so that I could hear the phone if it rang and went back into the living room. Peter Khoury was at the window looking out at the ocean. We hadn't talked much on the drive, but he'd volunteered the information that he hadn't had a drink or a drug since the meeting I'd seen him at.

"So I got five days," he said.

"That's great."

"That's the party line, isn't it? One day or twenty years, you tell somebody your time and they tell you it's great. 'You're sober today and that's what counts.' Fucked if I know what counts anymore."

I went over to Kenan and Yuri and we talked. The bedroom phone didn't ring, but after perhaps fifteen minutes the one in the living room sounded and Yuri answered it. He said, "Yeah, this is Landau," and glanced significantly at me, then tossed his head to get the hair out of his eyes. "I want to talk to my daughter," he said. "You got to let me talk to my daughter."

I went over and he handed me the phone. I said, "I hope the girl's alive."

There was a silence, then, "Who the fuck are you?"

"I'm the best chance you've got of making a nice clean exchange, the girl for the money. But you'd better not hurt her, and if you're playing any games they better get called right now on account of rain.

Because she has to be alive and well for the deal to happen."

"Fuck this shit," he said. There was a pause and I thought he was going to say more, but he hung up.

I reported the conversation to Yuri and Kenan. Yuri was agitated, concerned that I was going to screw things up by taking a hard line.