The Boy Who Followed Ripley (19 page)

Some fifteen yards in front of them, the car pulled out, and turned smartly left into the next cross-street. Peter followed, and they saw the car turn right into a busier street. Two cars then got between them, but Tom kept the men’s car in view, and at its next left turn saw in the headlights of another car that the car’s color was maroon.

“The car’s dark red. That’s the car!”

“You know it?”

“It’s the car that was in Lübars.”

They followed, for what seemed to Tom five minutes but was perhaps half that, through two more turns, Tom navigating all the way, until Tom saw the car slow at a parking place on the left side of a street full of four- or six-story dwellings, whose windows looked mostly unlighted now.

“Can you stop here and back a bit,” Tom said quickly.

Tom wanted to try to see which house they went into. And then, if possible, see if a light came on on a certain floor. These were again the dreary middle-class or lower middle-class apartment buildings which had escaped the bombs of World War II. Thanks to the tan jacket, Tom was able to make out a fuzzy shadow, lighter than the background, which mounted some steps at one of the front doors. He saw the light jacket disappear into the house.

“Go ahead about three meters—please, Peter.”

As Peter inched ahead, Tom saw a third floor light grow brighter, and a second floor light grow dim to nonexistence. A minuterie system? Hall lights? A third floor light to the left then came on more strongly. A second floor light on the right remained bright and unchanged. Tom groped in the bottom of his handbag, where coins and paper money lay disorganized, and found the key he had taken from the pocket of the Italian type.

“Right, Peter, you can drop me here,” Tom said.

“You want me to wait?” Peter whispered. “What are you going to do?”

“Not sure.” Peter’s car now stood on the right side of the street close to a row of parked cars, not annoying anyone. Peter might have been able to stay here fifteen minutes, but Tom did not know how long he would be, and he did not want to endanger Peter’s life, in case a couple of them stormed out of the house shooting at him, and Peter tried to pick him up. Tom knew he sometimes imagined the worst, the absurdest. Did the key he had work the front door, the apartment door, or neither? Tom envisaged himself pressing half a dozen buttons downstairs until some innocent soul, not the kidnappers, let him into the building. “I’ll just try to scare them,” Tom said, tapping his fingertips on the door handle.

“You don’t want me to telephone the police? Now or in five minutes?”

“No.” Tom was going to get the boy or not, accomplish something or not, before the police could get here, and if the police arrived in time or too late, Tom’s name would be dragged in by them, and that he did not want. “The police don’t know anything about this, and I want it that way.” Tom opened the car door. “Don’t wait, and slam the car door when you’re farther away.” He half-closed the door after himself, so that it made only a faint click.

A woman in a light-colored dress passed Tom on the pavement, gave Tom a rather startled glance, and walked on.

Peter’s car slid onward into darkness, into safety, and Tom heard its door slam. Tom concentrated on getting up the few front steps in his high heels, holding his long skirt a few inches above step level, so he wouldn’t trip.

Inside the first front door, there was a panel of at least ten buttons, most marked with unclear names and not all with apartment numbers indicated. Discouraging, Tom thought, as he might have dared ring 2A or 2B, if he had seen it. That had been a second floor light by European counting, third floor by American. Tom tried the Yale lock type of key which he had in his hand. It worked in the lock. Tom felt a shock of surprise. Perhaps each of the gang carried such a housekey, and there was always someone in the apartment to open the apartment door? Which apartment now? Tom pressed the minute-light button, and saw an uninviting brown stairway of unpolished wood, and two closed doors, one on either side of where he stood.

He dropped the key into his handbag, and felt for the gun. He pushed the safety to an off position, left the gun in the handbag, and began climbing the stairs, again holding up his skirt in front. As Tom approached the next floor, a door closed, a man appeared in the hall, and another minute-light came on when the man pressed a wall button. Tom was confronted by a thick, middle-aged man in trousers and sports shirt, who wished to descend the stairs, and who stepped aside less out of politeness than as if alarmed by the sight of Tom.

Tom supposed the man might think he was a prostitute making a call, or some such, rather than a man in drag, and kept on climbing and turned to go to the next floor.

“Do you live here?” asked the old gent in German.

“Jawohl,” Tom replied softly, but with conviction.

“Strange goings on here,” the man murmured to himself, and went on down the stairs.

Tom climbed another flight. The stairs creaked a little. He saw lights under two doors, left and right. There seemed to be two other flats at the rear, doors anyway. The apartment Tom was interested in would be on the left, but Tom listened briefly at the door on the right, heard what he thought was a television voice, then went to the left-hand door. He heard a very low hum of voices, at least two voices. Tom pulled Peter’s gun out. He had pressed the minute-light on this floor, and it had perhaps thirty seconds of light left. The door appeared to have a single lock, but it looked strong enough. What the hell to do next? Tom was not sure, but he knew his best ploy was to surprise them, get them off balance.

Tom pointed his gun at the lock, just as the light went out. Then Tom knocked loudly on the door with the knuckles of his left hand, causing his handbag to slide down to his left elbow.

There was a sudden silence behind the door. Then after a few seconds, a man’s voice asked in German, “Who is it?”

“
Polizei!
” Tom yelled in a firm, no-nonsense voice. “
O-pen!
” he added in German.

Tom heard a scurrying, a scrape of chair legs, which however sounded not yet panicky. He again heard low voices. “
Polizei, öffnet!
” he said, and banged on the door with the side of his fist. “
Ihr seid umringt!
”

Were they even now getting out via some window? Tom took the precaution of stepping to the right of the door, in case they fired through the door, but his left hand rested on the door lock, just under the knob, so he knew where it was.

The minute-light went out.

Then Tom stepped in front of the door and set the muzzle of the gun at the crack between metal and wood and fired. The gun bounced back in his hand, but he kept his grip on it, and at the same time he gave the door a push with his shoulder. The door did not yield completely: it appeared to have a chain, Tom wasn’t sure. Tom yelled again, “
Open!
” in a voice that might terrorize even the people on the same floor behind their closed doors, and Tom hoped they stayed there, but now one door opened slightly behind him, Tom saw from a glance over his shoulder. Tom didn’t care about the door behind him. He heard someone opening the door in front of him. They might be giving up, Tom thought.

The young blond man in the blue shirt had opened the door, the light from behind him fell on Tom. The man started with surprise, and reached for his back pocket. Tom had his gun pointed at the blue shirt front. Tom took a step into the room.

“Surrounded!” Tom repeated in German. “Get out over the
roof
! You are not going to get out the door
below
!— Where is the boy? Is he here?”

The man in the tan jacket—open-mouthed in the middle of the room—made an impatient gesture, and said something to a third man, a sturdy type with brown hair, shirtsleeves rolled up. The blue shirt had kicked the shattered door shut—it would not shut and hung partly open—and then had run into a room on Tom’s left, where the front window would be. There was a big oval table in the room where Tom stood. Someone had turned out a ceiling light, which left one standing lamp’s light on.

All was confusion for a few seconds, and Tom even thought of fleeing while he could.
They
might flee and plug him on the way. Had he made a mistake in not having Peter get the police, complete with sirens below? Tom yelled suddenly in English:

“Get out while you
can
!”

The blue shirt, after quick words with the man in shirtsleeves, handed his gun to the tan jacket, and went into a room on Tom’s right. Tom at once heard a thud from there, as if a suitcase had fallen.

Tom was afraid to look for the boy, as long as he had his own gun focused on the man in the tan jacket—for what Tom’s gun was worth, because the tan jacket also had a gun in his hand. Tom heard a voice behind him ask in German:

“What’s going on
here
?”

Tom glanced behind him. That had come from a curious neighbor in the hall—so it seemed—a man in house slippers and with wide-eyed fear in his face, ready to duck back into his apartment.

“Get away from here!” yelled the man in the tan jacket.

The shirtsleeved man, who had been in the front room, hurried into the room where Tom was, and Tom was aware of the neighbor fading away behind him.

“Okay,
shnell
!” said the shirtsleeved man, grabbing a jacket that had been over a chair by the oval table. He put the jacket on, and his free hand for an instant pointed upward. He ran across the room toward the door on Tom’s right, and collided with the man in the blue shirt who was coming through the door with a suitcase.

Had they really seen something on the street, Tom wondered, cops already, due to the shot he had fired? Not likely! Past him now ran the man in the blue shirt with the suitcase, and then the man in the tan jacket. They were taking the stairs to the roof, Tom saw, and either the roof door was open by prearrangement, or they had the key. Tom knew there were no fire escapes in such houses, only central courts for fire engines, and roof exits. The man in the ordinary jacket now dashed past Tom, carrying what looked like a brown briefcase. He went up the stairs, slipping, recovering. He had run into Tom in his dash and nearly knocked him down. Tom now closed the door as well as he could. A big splinter of old wood made closing impossible.

Tom went into the room on the right. He still held Peter’s gun pointed forward, as if at an enemy.

This room was a kitchen. On the floor lay Frank with a towel tied to cover his mouth, hands behind his back, ankles tied, on a blanket. But the boy moved, rubbed his face against the blanket as if in an effort to get the towel off.

“He-ey,
Frank
!” Tom knelt by the boy and pushed the tied dish towel down over Frank’s chin to his neck.

The boy drooled, bleary with drugs or sleeping pills, Tom supposed, unable to focus his eyes.

“F’God’s sake!” Tom murmured, and looked around for a knife. He found one in a drawer of the kitchen table, but it felt so dull to his thumb, he seized a breadknife from the drainboard. There were a couple of empty Coca-Cola tins on the drainboard. “Have you loose in a minute, Frank,” Tom said, and began sawing away at the rope around Frank’s wrists. The rope was strong and half an inch in diameter, but the knot looked much too tight to try to untie. During this sawing, Tom listened for another entry at the apartment door.

The boy spat, or tried to, onto the blanket. Tom slapped him nervously on the cheek.

“Wake up! It’s
Tom
! We’re leaving in a minute!” Tom wished there were time for him to make some instant coffee, even with cool water from the sink, but Tom did not dare take the time even to look for instant coffee. He attacked the ankle ropes now, sawed half the wrong loop first, and cursed. Finally he got the rope off, and hauled the boy up. “Can you walk, Frank?” Tom had lost one high-heeled pump, and he kicked off the other. Better to be barefoot under the circumstances.

“T-to-um?” said the boy, looking one hundred percent drunk.

“Here we go, boy!” Tom swung one of Frank’s arms around his neck, and they started in the direction of the apartment door, Tom hoping that some movement might wake the boy up a little. As they struggled toward the door, Tom looked around in the carpetless living room for anything the men might have left, a notebook, a scrap of paper, but he saw nothing like that. Evidently they had been neat and efficient, with all their gear gathered in one place. Tom saw only what looked like a dirty shirt that had been dropped in a corner. He saw that he had still, somehow, the handbag on his left arm, and remembered sticking the gun back into it, and shoving the handbag on his arm, before lifting Frank. In the hall, three neighbors confronted him, two men and one woman, astounded, scared.

“
Alles geht gut!
” Tom said, realizing that he sounded mad and shrill, and the three did fall back slightly as Tom made for the stairs.

“Is that a woman?” one of the men asked.

“We have telephoned the
police
!” the woman said menacingly.

“All is in order!” Tom replied. It sounded so good in German.

“
Drugged
the boy is!” said one of the men. “Who
are
these animals?”

But Tom and Frank continued down the stairs, Tom supporting nearly all of the boy’s weight, and suddenly they were out the front door—having passed only two slightly opened apartment doors with curious eyes peering out. Tom nearly fell going down the stone front steps, as there was no wall to lean against.

“
Sacred holy spirits!
” This came from one of a pair of young men walking on the pavement, and they laughed loudly. “May we help you,
gnädige Frau
?” This with exaggerated politeness.

“Yes, thank you, we need a taxi,” Tom replied in German.

“That we can easily see! Ha-ha! A taxi,
meine Dame
! At once!”

“Never did a lady need a taxi
more
!” the other contributed.

With the aid of these two, Tom and Frank got to the next corner without much difficulty, the two young men guffawing at Tom’s bare feet, and asking such questions as, “What have you two been
doing
?” But the two stood by, and one of the young men went out into the street and energetically tried to hail a taxi. Tom glanced up at a street signpost and saw that the street he had just walked through, where the kidnappers’ apartment was, was called Binger Strasse. Tom now heard police sirens. But a taxi had been found! It slid up. Tom got into the taxi first and pulled the boy after him, much helped by the cheerful young men.