I potted the rustler in the hotel window. Alexei said, ‘What?’
Johnson said, ‘What about the bear on the ground over there? Let’s take that fellow next.’
I potted the stooge through the bar-flaps.
Donovan fired his last shot and craned, with Hugo, over the counter. He said, ‘I didn’t see any bears on the goddam . . .’
I couldn’t help it. My eye followed theirs down to the floor instead of watching my target.
Alexei, stooping, lifted a bear from the ground. It had a badge on its bosom. I shot, and missed the guy in the waterbutt.
Alexei straightened, holding the bear in both arms like a parcel. With a bang and a flash, the little tin guy in the waterbutt shot back with a red light, and missed me.
He got Alexei, though. Alexei bellowed.
We all looked at him. There was blood all over his arm, and even more on the bear, which he had dropped on the counter in a blizzard of guaranteed sterilized kapok. Alexei had only been winged. But the Brownbellied Bruin would speak no more; for it had been drilled cleanly through the brown belly.
We taught those rustlers a lesson. The waterbutt killer had gone. But the next little tin hoodlum got three pellets bang in the stomach and went offstage bent like a hairpin, while Hugo managed to hammer the Wells Fargo hatchetman twice. Then he said, ‘For Chrissakes, what are we doing!’ and flung the rifle down and dashed to where Johnson had already plunged through the scattering crowd, towards the distant form of a man whose black, curly hair I had seen retreating like this once before, just after he’d thrust Benedict into a trash bucket.
The smoking tin cutouts were guiltless. It was Rudi Klapper, of the Carl Shurz Park, who had shot Alexei, and shot also the one bear which had been hidden from casual custom. Set aside with an M.M.A. badge in its fur to await another M.M.A. badge to claim it. Because recorded inside, of course, was the kidnap message.
I scooped up the wreck of the bear and took to my heels after Johnson.
I lost him. I couldn’t see Donovan. A red wooden buggy appeared flying a streamer saying ‘Missy’s Wonderland’ and with three familiar heads crammed into it. I took a flying leap and landed in Donovan’s lap just as it rocketed off at top speed through the Park, with Hugo’s bald head lowered over the wheel. I said, ‘It was Rudi Klapper. Where is he?’ One wheel ran up a tree root and down again.
Donovan said, ‘Will you take your bloody bear out of . . . Thanks. He jumped on the Transcontinental Adventure Train.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘He’s crossed the pond on the train to the parking lot. We have to get round fast, if we’re to catch him,’ said Johnson. ‘Christ, watch the . . .’
He didn’t bother to finish. Behind us, a twenty-foot cluster of balloons rose in the air, over a blaspheming and recumbent balloon man. An ice cream and pretzel stall rocked and there was a small crunch as we went over a set of low railings. There was a smell of fish, and a sound of squealing and splashing. Hugo turned abruptly left, missing two shining grey shapes lumbering out of a swimming pool, grinning.
A rubber ring, descending, pinned our Missy flag to its mast, stinking of dolphin. Donovan uncovered his eyes and covered them again as a chain of antique cars approached, full of children. Hugo spun the wheel and the buggy plunged into a garden of sheep, angora rabbits and llamas, which spat before bolting.
Hugo drove between trees in hysterical lunges. We came out into the open and there ahead was the parking lot, with Johnson’s Mercedes in it. And far beyond it, near the entrance, a low grey Dodge pulling out slowly, with its near front door open and Rudi Klapper racing towards it. We fell out beside the Merc. Johnson said, ‘Joanna, come with me. You two, get up the Sky Ride and watch.’
He had the doors open already. He flung the bear in and switched on the ignition. I dived in behind him. I slammed the door.
Rudi Klapper jumped into the Dodge.
Johnson switched on the ignition again.
Rudi Klapper slammed his door. The Dodge revved up and began to move, fast.
Johnson switched on the ignition again. The dashboard glowed green in his glasses. Without a word, he grabbed and fastened his seatbelt.
The Dodge, accelerating, shot to the gates of the park.
Johnson tried the ignition again and then, his hands on the wheel, turned and looked at me.
I said, ‘I think you need to fasten the bear into its safety-belt.’
With infinite care, my father’s friend Johnson leaned over and ripping out both ends of the belt, clipped them round the sagging fur paunch of the Brownbelly Bruin. Then with equal care he switched on the ignition.
With a roar, the engine fired. The tyres squealed as the car hurtled forward. They squealed again as it stopped with a jolt at the feet of a Saggy Baggy Elephant standing placidly in mid-road, demanding our parking-ticket.
I yelled out of the window while Johnson jerked backwards and sideways to get round the obstacle. The Saggy Baggy sidestepped thoughtfully and leaning its elbow on the window, began to make a long, muffled statement in Brooklynese.
Johnson reversed again, nearly taking its rubber trunk with him, and this time scraped round and down the road to the highway.
There was no sign of the Dodge, and there were fifteen container trucks passing. We got out on the tail of the last one, and weaving from lane to lane raced for five or six miles before being flagged down for good, by the State troopers. Johnson’s explanation, with the burst teddy bear tidily strapped into the pullman beside him, was a miracle of courteous forbearance in the face of raucous incredulity.
We drove under escort back to Missy’s American Wonderland and found a lot of screaming coming down from the Sky Ride. Investigation disclosed that Hugo and Donovan had been up in the cable cars for twenty minutes plotting the Dodge’s itinerary, in aid of which Hugo had cut off the power.
We introduced him to the police as the designer of Missy’s Golden American Wonderland, and the police became suddenly interested. We all repaired to Hugo’s office, having sent word to Bunty and Charlotte and visited both The Great Shoot-Out and Alexei in the First Aid Room. All the bears had disappeared from the ground by the stall where we had left them. The State trooper who had asked the most questions said, ‘And you think this was the bear you were meant to win, if the kidnap had really taken place?’
I said, ‘I suppose so. Or at least, Klapper thought so.’
‘Then,’ said the trooper with impeccable deduction, ‘the message inside must have contained something he thought would give him away?’
‘Who can tell?’ Johnson said. His glasses looked soulful.
‘Well, I can,’ said Hugo Panadek. ‘If you’ll give me a while with a tool or two. He’s smashed the spindle, but the rest is mostly all right, I shouldn’t wonder.’
We made our statements while Hugo worked, and then Bunty and Charlotte arrived, with six kids and three new boyfriends, and Missy’s catering staff sent in a stack of hamburgers.
I was on my fourth when Hugo said, ‘Well. I think that does it,’ and set something in motion.
From inside the last Brownbelly Bear a new voice spoke: a guttural voice, quite unlike that of the Lover Bear we all knew and were sick of.
The voice said, ‘Mr and Mrs Booker-Readman, I have your son. He is nailed in a box, without food and drink and with enough air to last him until midnight tomorrow.
‘At eight o’clock tomorrow night, you will come to the tree nearest this stall, and leave beside it a paper carrier bag containing four million dollars in old bills. If you tell the police, no one will collect the money and your son’s box will never be found. He’ll starve and suffocate, Mr and Mrs Booker-Readman, if l am arrested, or if I even suspect you have set a trap for me.
‘So bring the money. Do as you’re told. And you’ll have your son back. He’s very upset, Mrs Booker-Readman, and very cold and very hungry. And he’s going to stay that way, till he’s paid for. Remember - no police.’
Someon
e, I don’t know who, put an arm briefly round my crumb-strewn sweater. The patrolman said, ‘Well, that’s freaky. Why should he stick his ass out to smash up that message? It don’t tell us nothing!’
‘It does,’ I said. ‘The accent. It tells us the accent is Russian. And that goes with the man in the car. The man who had the Dodge ready and out in the parking lot. I thought I recognized him, but I couldn’t be sure. I’m sure now.’
‘So am I,’ Johnson said, ‘I was wondering if you’d seen him. The man waiting for Rudi was Vladimir, your launderette Ukrainian from Winnipeg.’
SEVEN
Whatever they did to the Booker-Readmans, the kidnap demands got me into a tangle.
Arriving home from Missy’s Golden American Wonderland I wasn’t interested in anything or anybody but checking to see if Ben was in good running order. I lurched creaking up the stairs like a blackcurrant straddle harvester and barely noticed that Simon and Rosamund were engaged in the preliminary bouts of a magnificent spat. The words ‘Your pathetic Kraut’ rose to the surface several times, and after I had checked that my brat was safely asleep I slung my things off and went and had a good listen.
If I thought it was going to be about my call from Hugo’s office about the threat to their son, I was out in my reckoning. They were discussing Comer Eisenkopp’s invitation to spend Easter with them at Cape Cod.
Simon saw no harm in going and Rosamund thought he was out of his tiny mind, to put himself under an obligation to these people. Simon said it was pathetic Krauts like that who kept her mother going, and Rosamund said that if Comer and Beverley Eisenkopp thought they were going to get an invitation to the gala in Venice, they were going to be bloody disappointed. To which Simon replied that invitations to Warr Beckenstaff galas were Warr Beckenstaff business, and since when had her mother paid the slightest attention to anything her darling daughter said or did, except to do her level best to keep her from marrying anything less than a duke, until she had to get herself in pig.
‘Well put,’ said Rosamund bitterly. ‘I bloody nearly did have to do it myself. And now look what’s happening. Some hoodlum snatches her grandson, and there’s Grandmother’s fortune, gone for nothing.’
‘She won’t pay, darling,’ said Simon. ‘You’re quite safe. They’ll kill the boy next time and you can take Joanna on as your social secretary. However will they get their jollies at the Long Island Cerebral Palsy Fair without you?’
‘Don’t knock it. It does wonders for your image, Simon, if you’ll forgive the expression,’ Rosamund said. ‘On the other hand, helping the underprivileged has never been your thing, has it? If someone destroyed your looks tomorrow, what would you do? What would you do? Do you ever think of it?’
‘You mean you’d stop loving me?’ Simon said, and laughed. ‘My word, I can’t think what I’d do, darling. Or yes, I can. I think I’d have to run to Grandma for help.’
There was a little silence. Then Rosamund, in a voice drawling with rage said, ‘Of course you must do as you like. Don’t fail to explain, while you’re about it, how the Lesnovo ikon came to be smashed in the Eisenkopps’ bog.’
‘What?’ said Simon.
‘You’re so quick, darling,’ Rosamund said. ‘Joanna the paragon found it, along with Bunty Cole and God knows who else. Joanna brought it here because they thought it might be the lost ikon.’
‘And?’ said Simon. His voice had weakened.
‘And I said it wasn’t, and burned it. It was a rotten copy, even for you. I shan’t ask the obvious question.’
‘You might as well. You’ll get the obvious answer,’ said Simon Booker-Readman. ‘I’ve no idea how it got there. Probably one of the children.’
‘Benedict?’ said Rosamund scathingly.
It couldn’t have been telepathy. But as Rosamund mentioned his name Benedict woke, and finding himself wet and unhappy and hungry, broadcast the fact, without delay, through the baby alarm. The sitting-room door opened and Rosamund came out.
I was three steps back, on the last tread of the stair when she saw me. I said, ‘I’ll see to it, Mrs Booker-Readman. I was just coming down to tell you I was in.’
Rosamund stood perfectly still. Below her long face and incurving hair everything was in the severest good taste: her cardigan, her ombre striped silk blouse, her wrap-around skirt and good shoes. She said, ‘I should rather like you to come and see me the moment you get in, Joanna. One likes to know just how many people are in one’s house at any moment.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to make sure Benedict was all right.’
‘I’m sure I don’t know how we manage without you,’ Rosamund said. ‘But he seems to have survived. We had a call from the police. Thanks to Mr Panadek, they found the getaway cars.’
The crying intensified. I had one foot on the upper step, but I took it down. ‘Cars? In the plural?’ I said. Hugo’s vigil with Donovan in the Sky Ride had paid off.
‘A Dodge, and another car with some sort of fancy elephant costume in it. They assumed a third car was waiting to take the three men away. The police think it was another kidnapping attempt which didn’t come off, since you didn’t take Benedict with you.’
‘Take Benedict to a fun fair? They must be crazy,’ I said. ‘But economical, at that. They could use the bear message twice.’
‘Sukey was taken,’ Rosamund pointed out. There was no sign of Simon. If she wondered what I’d heard of their conversation, it didn’t show in her manner, which was coolly non-affable, as usual. She said, ‘The police have advised us to get a bodyguard, and this we shall probably have to do. In the meantime, Benedict is not to go out. Do you understand?’
I understood. I was not to gossip in parks with other interested elements of the network. And Grandmother’s money was to be preserved as well as might be for better ends than paying Benedict’s blackmailers. I ran upstairs and picked up Benedict, who was crying real, glistening tears. Then he saw it was me, and delivered a chinless smile and I said, ‘Benedict Booker-Readman, you represent unpleasant, menial work with unsocial hours, and I am not going to get hooked on someone else’s incontinent bastard.’
He lay on my lap by the wash basin, his head turned to watch all my movements, and smiled, and cooed like a pigeon. It isn’t fair. It’s my last brat. I’m going to leave the profession. I’m going to turn into an old, unmarried lady who keeps retired cart horses.
The next day, Simon appointed his personal strongman for Benedict. It turned out to be Denny Donovan, which wasn’t too surprising, since he knew the job was going, I suppose, before most people. They gave him a room in the attic, and he moved in from his digs with a sleeping-bag, a moisture gauge, a light meter, some insecticide, an old army revolver and a can of liquid banana. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have employed him. But he was hefty, and willing, and cheap, and no doubt was expected to keep my mind off everything that wasn’t business.
Certainly, he was a revelation on the subject of plant doctoring. He had, he said, majored in fiddle leaf figs and was now fully qualified to make house to house calls including treatment and surgery. He could hold discussion groups for troubled plants and open clinics and sell records to grow them by. He was saving for a sunray lamp for a sick Mottled Bigleaf Periwinkle. It was so fascinating I was quite surprised when he mentioned the Wonderland, and observed that one of the getaway cars had been traced to a private parking lot belonging to Madison Square Garden.
It had been stolen, he said, the previous day, and from an area virtually inaccessible to the public. Which made it look as if Rudi Klapper, or the man I knew as Vladimir, or the unknown inside the elephant outfit, or even all three, may have had showbiz connections beyond the scope of Missy’s Golden American Wonderland.
It seemed weak-minded to me, to steal a car from your own car park instead of a public one. But on the other hand, but for Hugo and Donovan’s sky spotting, the getaway cars would probably never have been found.
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘There’s to
be a parade of Madison Square Garden employees wearing Saggy Baggy Elephant suits and pushing trash cans.’
‘Nope,’ said my ice hockey king, continuing with his current task, which was erecting illicit shelving. ‘They reckon that someone’s still hoping to entice Benedict out of the house, and that some time you’ll be sent a couple of tickets for a kids’ show. Meanwhile, the fuzz are making like they know nothing of it.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Denny, Benedict is nine weeks old.’
‘Well,’ said Donovan. ‘It’s not all boxing at the Garden. They put on other things.’
‘No?’ I said. ‘He won’t stir out of his pram unless it’s a strip show.’
Donovan thought. ‘Well, if I don’t know what a kid that age wants, I guess they don’t know either. Hey, d’you know Mrs Booker-Readman’s Busy Lizzie’s got greenfly?’
I let it pass. As far as I was concerned, it was just a redress of the Balance of Nature. But two days later, I remembered that conversation when the Brazilian daily came in with a note from the Eisenkopps.
It was for me, from Grandfather Eisenkopp. In it, he said that he and Grover thought I would like one of the great American experiences. Enclosed therefore were four tickets for the forthcoming Okmulgee World Championship Rodeo at Madison Square Garden, and he hoped I would use them, whether to take kids or my own friends on an evening off. Yours truly, Elijah Eisenkopp.
‘There you are,’ I said to Donovan. ‘The Eisenkopp fortune has nothing to do with their toy empire. It is founded on kidnapping. A Prussian branch of Mafia. Grandpa Eisenkopp is only bedridden because he got a low sabre-cut at a christening. He could have planned it. He knew how and when I was going with Bunty to Missy’s Golden American Wonderland.’
‘If he did, he also knew you were going without the baby,’ remarked my plant doctor.
He was not stupid, that fellow. Not entirely stupid, anyway. He phoned the police, and then he phoned Charlotte, who broke the news to Mrs Mallard that two nights hence she was expected to look after her own four kids and Benedict Booker-Readman for an entire evening.