Bill Pronzini - The Snatch

“I’m sorry.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down?” Martinetti said. “You aren’t helping us or yourself being down here.”

“I don’t want to be alone, Lou.”

“Cassy will stay with you.”

“I want to stay here.”

He moistened his lips. “All right, then.”

And the three of us sat, waiting. The sun climbed perpendicular in the pale blue autumn sky, and then started its slow and repetitive descent toward the western horizon. Cassy came out with a plate of sandwiches and some chilled raw vegetables, but none of us seemed to be very hungry. I smoked three more cigarettes, carefully, like a junior high school kid locked in the bathroom, and nothing happened in my chest. The tension was still strong in the air, growing stronger, but I could handle it now; I had my crutch back.

Shortly past one the silver MG roadster I had seen the day before pulled across the wooden bridge into the drive and Dean Proxmire got out. He came hurrying across the lawn and onto the terrace, harried and pale and somber. His eyes, when they touched Karyn Martinetti’s face, held a deep concern-and something else that I could not quite read.

Martinetti said, “Did you take care of things at the office?”

“Yes. Any news yet?”

“Nothing.”

“Christ, what’s taking him so long?”

“I wish to God I knew.”

Proxmire sank into the fourth chair at the table, looked at Karyn Martinetti again, looked at the back of his hands. He said softly, bitterly, “The bastard. The lousy bastard.”

More silence. Five minutes passed. And then, suddenly, Martinetti scraped his chair back and got to his feet. He lifted the near-empty decanter off the table. “I’m going into the study,” he said. He looked at me. “Are you coming?

I said, “All right,” and stood up.

“Dean?”

“If you don’t mind, I’ll stay here with Karyn,” Proxmire said.

“Why should I mind?” Martinetti said.

They looked at one another steadily, and something indefinable passed between them. I wondered what kind of relationships lay below the proper surface in this nice Hillsborough house-but it wasn’t any of my business. I had enough to worry about.

Martinetti turned on his heel and I followed him through the living room and down the side hallway and through the ornate double doors into his study. He went over to the bar and got a glass from behind it and took that and the decanter to his desk. I sat on the couch facing him. He said, “Help yourself if you want a drink,” and poured his glass three-quarters full.

The silence deepened after a time, seeming to gain volume, so that it was like a screaming cacophony of sound just beyond the range of hearing. I developed a headache from listening to it, from the tension of waiting. I made a couple of attempts at conversation, but Martinetti was not having any. He sat there drinking and staring at a point high on the wall above his stereo components, moving just a little every now and then to ease a cramped muscle. He did not look at me at all.

I got up a couple of times and prowled the room, looking at the books on the shelves, the hammered-copper curios, the stereo unit. The books were stuffy English classics and modern romances and biographical studies, the records were fugues, Chopin and Bartok and Shostakovich, mood and dinner music-but no jazz; none of it much interested me. I went through a half-dozen more cigarettes, and there was a rasping in my chest now and I knew that the next one would bring on the coughing. I could hear Erika’s voice saying over and over in my mind, When are you going to grow up? Do you think you’ve got the body of a teenager? When are you going to grow up?

* * * *

The call came at nine minutes past four.

The sound of the bell seemed to explode in the strained, deafening hush of the room. Martinetti came half out of his chair in a convulsive movement, freezing there, his eyes bulging toward the phone, his hands gripping the edge of the desk. I got on my feet and swallowed against a dryness in my throat.

Martinetti gave a kind of shiver, as if to regenerate mobility, and then caught up the receiver with his right hand. He said, “Hello?” in a hoarse whispering voice.

He did not say anything else for more than a minute. He held the instrument pressed tightly to his ear, the hand white and rigid around it, his face a mask of intense concentration as he listened. Finally he said, “Yes, I understand,” paused, said, “Please, I’m doing just as you want, don’t hurt my-”

His mouth clamped shut, and the hand holding the receiver dropped slowly to his side. After a moment he reached out and placed the handset in its cradle and sank back down in his chair. He put his head in his hands.

I went up to the desk and saw that his shoulders were trembling almost imperceptibly, as if he might be silently weeping. I gave him thirty seconds, and then I said softly, “Mr. Martinetti.”

His head jerked up, and he looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. There was a grayness to the taut skin across his cheekbones, but his eyes were dry.

“Is anything wrong?” I asked him. “The call-?”

“No, no,” he said, and took a deep shuddering breath. “I … it’s just that I … I feel drained, purged, after all that waiting. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

There was a sharp rapping on the entrance doors, and one of them swung open and Proxmire came quickly into the study. Karyn Martinetti was behind him, her face the color of dirty snow. Proxmire said, “We heard the telephone. Was that-?”

Martinetti said, “Yes.”

“What did he say? Is Gary all right?”

“He’s all right.”

“Well, what did he say?”

Martinetti looked at him dully.

“Damn it, man, did he give you instructions for delivering the ransom money?” Proxmire demanded.

Martinetti seemed not to notice. “Yes.”

I said, “When will it be?”

“Tonight.”

“What time?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Where?”

“There’s a dirt road leading off Old Southbridge Road, up in the hills back of San Bruno,” Martinetti said woodenly. “You’re to drive in there exactly one mile. You’ll leave your car in a turnaround there and walk down the embankment at the left side of the road until you reach a flat sandstone rock. You’ll put the money on top of the rock and return to your car. Then you’ll turn the car around and go back the way you came.”

I thought it over. “It sounds kind of isolated. He’d be leaving himself wide open to a trap, if you’d played it the other way and called the police.”

“Not really,” Proxmire said. “I know that area, and there’s another road at the bottom of the embankment. If he waits down there, there are a dozen streets he can slip into once he has the money.”

I nodded, and said to Martinetti, “Was there anything else?”

“A warning,” he answered softly. “No police, and no tricks. If he’s picked up, and doesn’t return to a certain place at a certain time, there is someone with the boy who has instructions to …” He broke off, and dry-washed his face savagely with both hands. “When he has the money, we’ll get a call telling us where to find Gary. That’s all.”

I took a breath. “Have you got a map of the drop area?”

“I think there’s one in the hall table.”

“I’ll get it,” Proxmire said. He went to where Karyn Martinetti was standing with both hands hooked onto the couch in front of the fireplace, took her arm, and led her out of the room.

Martinetti got up and took the decanter over to the alcove. He poured a small one into his glass, drank it off, shuddered, and put the decanter away behind the bar. He said, “I’ve had enough of that.”