The Frumious Bandersnatch (24 page)

“Okay,” Loomis said, and looked up, too, and nodded.

“Steve?”

“Yes?”

“Here's what I want you to do, Steve. Unholster your weapon. Remember, we're watching you.”

Carella transferred the phone to his left hand. He reached down into his holster, yanked the Glock up and into his hand.

“It's out,” he said.

“This is a bad neighborhood,” Avery said. “I guess you noticed that.”

“I noticed it.”

“We don't want anything to happen to that money. Keep the piece in your hand, Steve. Make sure it's visible in case any stray squatters get any brilliant ideas.”

“Okay.”

“Now I want you and Mr. Loomis to walk that money right into the red brick building there. Remember, we're watching you.”

“He wants us to go inside that building,” Carella told Loomis.

“Why?” Loomis asked, and again Carella looked at him.

Together the men walked toward the building where the absent 8-3-7 numerals left stark reminders on the entrance wall. The barricade was gone from the front door, fragments of wood still clinging to the door frame where the boards had been torn free. Carella walked into the building first, gun hand leading him. He heard a frenzied scurrying and squealing up ahead, and stopped dead in his tracks.

He did not appreciate rats.

When he and Teddy had been living in their Riverhead house for just a week, he'd opened the basement door and was heading downstairs when he spotted a rat the size of an alley cat sitting on the steps, staring up at him with his beady little eyes and twitching whiskers. He'd slammed the door shut at once, whirled on Teddy, and frantically signed,
We're selling the house!

He definitely did not appreciate rats.

“What the hell is
that?
” Loomis asked behind him, and then saw one of the rats and let out a short sharp shriek.

Into the phone, Carella said, “The place is overrun with rats. Tell me what you want us to do, okay?”

“Go up to the first floor. Apartment 14. The numerals are still on the door.”

“Are you walking us into a trap?” Carella asked.

“You've got a gun in your hand,” Avery reminded him.

They started up the steps, Carella in the lead. The hand railing was gone. They braced themselves against the opposite wall. The building stank of garbage and human waste. Loomis covered his nose with a handkerchief. Carella felt like wretching. A single unboarded window on the first-floor landing cast uncertain light into the hallway. Apartment 14 was the fourth door down the hall.

“We're here,” Carella said into the phone.

“Go inside.”

They went into the apartment. They were standing in the middle of a small kitchen. There were still boards on the only window in the room. In the semi-darkness, they heard the scurrying of more rats.

A dead Golden Retriever lay on the floor in front of a gas range that had been disconnected and overturned.

It looked as if the dog's throat had been recently slit.

Flies were still buzzing around the open wound.

“Do you see the dog?” Avery asked.

“Yes?”

“That's what we'll do to the girl if there are any tricks.”

Carella said nothing.

“See the refrigerator?” Avery asked.

“Yes?”

“Open the door, Steve.”

Carella opened the door.

“The fridge doesn't work, Steve,” Avery said. “No electricity in the building. I hope you didn't bring us hot money.”

He sounded almost jovial now. Big joke here, the son of a bitch. Slits a dog's throat, rats running all over the place, he jokes about hot money.

“What do you want me to do here?” Carella asked.

“You sound peeved, Steve.”

Carella said nothing.

“You didn't answer my question.”

“What did you ask?”

“Is the money hot?”

“No.”

“I certainly hope it's not marked or anything.”

“It's not marked.”

“Because I wouldn't want anything to happen to the girl.”

“It's not marked. Just tell me what you want me to do, okay?”

“What's he saying?” Loomis asked.

Carella shook his head.

“Put the dispatch case on one of the shelves, Steve.”

Carella slid the case onto the shelf under the ice cube compartment.

“Now close the door and hang up. When you're outside the building, I'll call again.”

Carella closed the refrigerator door, and hit the END button.

“Let's go,” he told Loomis.

They stepped out into the hallway again. Everywhere around them, there was the sound of chittering little creatures in the near-dark, glittering little eyes suddenly disappearing as the rats turned and ran off. He remembered being a rookie, remembered other cops telling him about babies in their cribs getting their faces chewed to ribbons by rats. Moving slowly and cautiously, he scraped his feet along the floor, feeling his way toward the stairwell.

“Here it is,” he told Loomis.

With his right hand, he felt for the wall again. With his left foot, he reached out for the first stair tread, afraid he would step on a rat. Behind him, Loomis said, “He's gone too far. Why'd he kill that dog?”

“To show us he's serious,” Carella said.

“That wasn't the deal.”

“He wanted me along to bear witness. So I'd go back and tell the others he's serious about killing the girl.”

“We already knew that. He already
told
us that.”

“Show is better than tell, Mr. Loomis.”

“That wasn't the deal,” Loomis said again, sounding very much like a petulant child. “Nobody gets hurt, that was the deal. He didn't have to kill the goddamn dog.”

They came down the stairs and out of the building. Both men blinked against the sunlight.

“Do you think they're holding her in one of these buildings?” Loomis asked.

“I hope not,” Carella said.

The phone rang immediately.

“Hello?” Carella said.

“This is what I want you and Mr. Loomis to do,” Avery said. “Are you listening?”

“I'm listening.”

“Walk back to the car. Put the phone to your ear again when you get there.”

The two men walked back to the limo. Carella put the phone to his ear again.

“We're here,” he said.

“I see you,” Avery said. “Just stand right where you are. I'll call you again when we have the case. You can hang up now.”

Carella hit the END button.

 

THEY CAME DOWN
from the seventh floor of the building at 5107 Ambrose, from which they'd been watching the action across the street at 837 South 185th. Hidden by the building itself, they crossed the empty lot behind it, and entered 837 through the rear door. They were both carrying the AK-47s they'd used on the boat gig two nights ago, but this time Cal's rifle was fitted with a scope. On the first floor of the building, he told Avery he felt like shooting himself some rats. Avery told him to resist the urge.

They found the black dispatch case in the refrigerator, right where Carella had left it. Cal threw the beam of a flashlight on it, and Avery unclasped it. There was no time to count the money right now, but those looked like a whole lot of nice brand-new hundred-dollar bills in there.

They went downstairs and out the back door again. This time, they crossed the lot to where they'd parked the stolen Montana behind a twelve-story building on Lasser. Carella and Loomis may have heard them starting the car, but it wouldn't matter, anyway. The girl was their insurance. Nobody was going to do anything stupid while they had the girl.

They didn't call again until almost an hour later. By that time, they'd dumped all the cell phones they'd used since three this afternoon. It was now close to five-thirty, and Avery was using yet another stolen phone when he called from the house out on Sands Spit.

Barney Loomis answered on the second ring.

“Hello?” he said.

“You can go back to your office now,” Avery said. “We'll call you again after we've counted the money. If it's all here, you'll get the girl back tonight. I promise.”

“Where will you…?” Loomis started, but Avery had already hung up.

TAMAR GUESSED
she should have felt honored.

This was just like a summit meeting.

Yasir Arafat was smiling. So were Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. All three of them were smiling—or at least their eyes were—but only Arafat was talking. Tamar figured he was the leader of the gang, the one who'd told her his eyes were brown. She could still see that his smiling eyes were brown. He was the same dude, all right.

“We have the money,” he told her. “Everything went off without a hitch.”

No wonder he was smiling.

The other two nodded in agreement. They were still smiling. George Bush had nice tits; Tamar wondered which one she was sleeping with.

“I'm telling you all this,” Arafat said, “because I want to warn you again not to do anything stupid.”

Do anything stupid! She was still handcuffed to the radiator!

“We're going to count the money now. If it's all here, we'll drop you off someplace, and you'll be home before you can spell your last name,” he said, and she wondered if that was an ethnic slur.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “Thank you,” she added.

For nothing, she thought.

“So be a good girl, honey,” Hussein said, smiling, and all three jackasses went out of the room.

She heard the lock clicking shut behind them.

 

OLLIE STOPPED
for a snack after he was relieved at a quarter to five, and then walked crosstown to his piano teacher's apartment, right here in the Eight-Eight. He had called her early Sunday morning to ask if she could get him the sheet music to Al Martino's “Spanish Eyes”…

“Not the one the Backstreet Boys did,” he cautioned.

…and she had promised she would try. Now, at seven minutes to six on this Monday night, the fifth of May, Ollie climbed the steps to the fifth floor and rapped on the door to apartment 53. He was glad he couldn't hear the sound of a piano inside. This meant her previous student had already left. Helen Hobson's apartment was tiny, and if she was still giving a lesson when he arrived, he had to wait outside in the hall.

She was smiling when she opened the door for him. A woman in her late fifties, rail thin and wearing her habitual green cardigan sweater over a brown woolen skirt, she said, “Well, Detective Weeks, you're right on time this evening.”

“Always a pleasure to come here,” Ollie said, which was the truth.

“Come in, come in,” Helen said, and stepped aside to let him by.

The grand piano always came as a surprise in this small apartment. Walking toward it behind his teacher, Ollie always felt as if he was being led onstage at Clarendon Hall. Sitting beside her on the piano bench, he always felt as if he was about to begin playing a duet with Arthur Rubenstein or Glenn Gould or one of those guys.

“Well, I got it,” Helen said, turning to him and beaming.

For a moment, Ollie was puzzled. Then he realized…

“ ‘Spanish
Eyes
'?” he asked, his own eyes brightening.

“Yes, indeed. I tried half a dozen different stores before I found it at Lenny's Music, all the way downtown. I was about ready to give up, Mr. Weeks, I must tell you.”

“I'm glad you didn't,” Ollie said.

“Oh, so am I. It's a lovely song.”

“You played it?”

“The moment I came home. It's truly lovely. And
so
romantic,” she said. “What made you decide to learn this particular song?”

“Well, like you say, it's very romantic…”

“Oh yes.”

“And uh truly lovely,” he said.

“Indeed. So what shall we do first? Would you like to play what you've been practicing, or would you like to bust your chops on the new one, as they say?”

“Why don't we just bust my chops?” Ollie said, grinning.

“Very well,” Helen said, and turned to the piano.

“Spanish Eyes” had a picture of Al Martino on its glossy front cover. With a flourish, Helen threw the cover back to reveal the actual sheet music.

Ollie was looking at a whole hell of a lot of notes.

“Gee,” he said, “I dunno.”

“Oh come now,” Helen said. “Is this the man who mastered ‘Night and Day'?”

“Yeah, but…”

“Put your hands on the keyboard, Mr. Weeks,” she suggested. “Please note that this is written in the key of…”

 

THEY LEFT THE
masks on because being Arafat and Hussein and Bush made them feel like big shots. Sitting at the kitchen table, the television set going in the other room, they kept reaching for banded bundles of money in the dispatch case, counting each bundle and writing down their separate tallies. Each bundle had twenty hundred-dollar bills in it. That came to $2,000 a bundle. Altogether, there were a hundred and twenty-five packets in that dispatch case. That didn't seem like very much, but that's what $250,000 in hundred-dollar bills looked like.

While they counted, they started talking about what they were going to do with all that money, even though it didn't seem like all that much now that it was actually here in front of them.

Yasir Arafat said he was going to use his $83,333 dollars to hire 833 suicide bombers at a hundred bucks a pop to go blow up restaurants and school busses and dance halls and the like all over Israel. Avery thought he was merely speaking in character, but Kellie figured he was probably anti-Semitic.

Saddam Hussein picked up the cue and said he was going to use his share of the money to purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles to shoot at “your father,” he told Kellie, “get the job done right this time.”

George W. Bush said she would spend her share of the money on a pair of strappy Prada pumps.

“That's not in character,” Avery told her.

“They'll be in character if I wear them with an Armani dress,” she said.

“You're supposed to be Bush,” he said.

“Whoever,” she said, and shrugged airily. All this money was making her a bit light-headed. Though, to tell the truth, it didn't look like so very much, fitting in the dispatch case that way.

They kept counting it.

In the other room, the six o'clock news was coming on.

The lead story was about Tamar Valparaiso's kidnapping. This immediately caught their complete attention. They got up from the kitchen table at once and en masse. Leaving all that money behind—though now that they were used to it, it didn't seem like all that much, really—they went into the living room and plopped down on the sofa as if they'd just got home from school, three kids who bore unfortunate resemblances to Bush, Arafat, and Hussein. The real Bush, Arafat, and Hussein were probably watching CNN themselves at that very same moment, though probably not wearing masks. And they probably were not as interested in Tamar Valparaiso.

The anchorman was saying there were no clues as yet to the whereabouts of the kidnapped rock star.

When they heard the word “star,” all three world leaders turned to look at each other, each of them realizing that Tamar hadn't been a star before they'd kidnapped her.

The anchor was saying that neither the police nor the FBI would ascertain whether or not a ransom demand had yet been made.

“Good,” Arafat said.

This was Avery Hanes, in case Kellie or Cal had forgotten.

The anchorman said, “Meanwhile, Billboard 200 reports that
Bandersnatch,
the diva's controversial album…”

“
‘Diva,'
did you hear that?” Hussein said.

“Shhhh,” Bush warned.

“…the number-one position, having sold 750,000 copies since its debut this past Friday. This places it higher on the charts than Avril Lavigne's new album at number four, the Dixie Chicks at number six, and Xzibit in the number-eight slot.”

The anchorman took a breath.

“In Israel this morning, another suicide bomber…”

Avery got up to turn off the television set. He pulled off his mask in the next instant. Kellie and Cal, taking this as their cue, removed their masks as well. They all looked very serious all at once.

“She's a fuckin star,” Cal said.

“I told her ten million,” Kellie said.

“What?” Cal asked, looking at her as if he wished she would speak English every now and then.

“I told her it would sell ten million copies,” Kellie explained. “Her album.”

“Well, it only sold 750,000,” Cal said, still looking angry.

“Only enough for number one,” Avery said.

“She told me we should've asked for a million bucks,” Kellie said.

The men looked at her.

“But that was when I said she'd sell ten million.”

The men were still looking at her.

 

WHEN THE TELEPHONE
in Barney Loomis' office rang at six-fifteen that night, Special Agent Jones was down the hall taking a pee. Endicott put on his ear phones, said to Carella, “Wanna give a listen?” and waited while Carella put on the phones Jones had left behind. Endicott nodded to Loomis. Loomis picked up.

“Hello?” he said.

“Mr. Loomis?”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Loomis,” Avery said, “we've counted all the money…”

“Yes, when can we pick up…”

“…and aside from the question of whether they're marked or not…”

“They're not marked. I promise you they're…”

“…there's the minor matter of the count being short.”

“First tower on it.”

“Short?”

“Yes, Mr. Loomis.”

“You said…”

“I said a million dollars, Mr. Loomis. You're short by…”

“No, you said…”

“…seven hundred and fifty large. Now I don't know what you're…”

“Just a minute, you never said…”

“…trying to pull here, but I thought the girl's safety was paramount.”

“Second tower's got him.”

“You never said a million dollars!” Loomis yelled into the phone. “You told me two-fifty, and that's what I…”

“What
ever
I told you, it's a million now!” Avery said, yelling himself now. “Get the rest of it by three tomorrow afternoon. I'll call again then. Have a nice night,” he said, and hung up.

“Listen…” Loomis started, but he was gone.

He looked blankly at the phone receiver, put it back on its cradle, looked at the detectives and the FBI agents and said almost plaintively, “We had a deal. We agreed it would be two-fifty. He knew that. This isn't fair.”

“Should've let us do it our way,” Corcoran said.

“Here's the printout,” Feingold said.

“Another stolen phone, I'll bet,” Endicott said.

Feingold read off the name and address. The VoiceStream subscriber was right here in the heart of the city.

“Roll on it,” Corcoran ordered. “Just two of you. Waste of time, anyway.”

Jones came back into the room.

He saw their faces.

“What?” he asked.

“You're heading out again,” Corcoran said. “Zip up your fly.”

“Lieutenant,” Carella said, “can I have a word with you?”

“Why, certainly, Steve. What is it?”

Big grin on his face. Cut off a man's legs and then smile right into his face.

Carella took him aside.

“If nobody minds, I think I'll just mosey on home,” he said, sounding like John Wayne, and feeling like Roberto Benigni.

“Why's that?” Corcoran asked.

Carella looked him dead in the eye.

“I have nothing to do here,” he said.

“Your help was requested, Steve.”

“You should have refused it.”

“We're always open to suggestion.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “Lieutenant,” he added.

“I beg your…”

“So long, Corky. Have fun.”

“Just a second here.”

Carella did not give him even a millisecond. He turned his back and headed for the door. Loomis caught up with him in the corridor outside.

“I'm sorry as hell about this,” he said.

“I had no right being here in the first place,” Carella said.

“I asked for you.”

“You shouldn't have.”

“They're just smelling blood,” Loomis said. “They still haven't caught whoever sent those anthrax letters, probably never will. They keep sending out alerts to protect their own asses should someone blow up the nearest nuclear plant or television station. So now they think they're going to make headlines when they catch these sons of bitches who've got Tamar, even though they can't even trace a fucking phone call. What they don't understand is that I don't
care
if we catch these people. All I want is Tamar back.”