Bill Pronzini: The Snatch

There were two men in the room, and both of them stood up as we came in. The man behind the desk was Louis Martinetti: tall, granite-hewn, hair and eyes the color of steel, nose strong and wide, the nostrils in a perpetual flare. He was forty-five, if you believed the newspapers, and from a distance he looked maybe ten years younger; you could almost feel the magnetism of the man reaching out at you across the room, and I was oddly reminded of an old pulp-magazine hero of the thirties and forties named Doc Savage. If Martinetti’s face and hands had been bronzed instead of merely lightly tanned, his hair a metallic silver instead of dark gray, the resemblance might have been startling. He wore an old alpaca golfing sweater over a salmon-colored polo shirt, and beige doeskin slacks.

The other man, Allan Channing, was similarly dressed, but perhaps as sharp a physical contrast to Martinetti as you could imagine. He was big but not fat, with fine thinning hair the color, or non-color, of dust. He had pink cheeks and a soft mouth, and no particular magnetism at all. His eyes were wide and blue and innocent, containing the earnest guilelessness of an inquisitive child. Those eyes had fooled a lot of people over the years, and that was one of the reasons Channing was worth something like five or six million dollars at the last conservative press estimate.

They made a pretty awesome pair, Channing and Martinetti. They were speculators, angle boys, long-shot and sure-shot gamblers, wheelers-and-dealers. If you live in California, you know the type; it’s a breeding ground for them. Real estate, industry, commerce-you name it, and if there’s a dollar to be made from its exploitation, they’ll find a way to make it. They were independents, self-made types, and if they had not been as adept, as cunning, as ruthless as they undoubtedly were, the large speculative concerns would have swallowed them up or destroyed them a long time ago.

Martinetti had made and lost a million dollars three or four times over the past twenty-odd years, and he had the reputation of being a hunch player who would take a flyer on almost anything if his judgment told him there was a chance it would pay off. Channing, on the other hand, was pretty much of a conservative; he liked to play it close to the vest, to leave the wildcatting to men like Martinetti. He had not come out on the short end in the past twenty years, and it was not likely that he ever would. That, in effect, was the difference between the two of them-and very possibly the reason that they had been able to remain friends over the years.

Proxmire and I approached the desk, and Martinetti’s eyes appraised me with each step, running me through the snap-computer that was his mind, with no outward showing of conclusions. And as I neared him, I could see that something was bothering him, weighing heavily on his mind-and that whatever it was had cracked the granite of his physical being with a network of hairline fractures, like a solid substance about to fragment itself from some inner pressure. There was a gauntness to his face, a shadowed hollowness to the gray eyes. A tic had gotten up on the left side of his face, high on the cheekbone, and his full, expressive mouth was quirked oddly because of it.

Proxmire made the introductions, and I shook hands with Martinetti and then with Channing. There was a chair to one side of the desk, between it and the couch where Channing was, and I sat down there at Martinetti’s indication and put my hands on my knees. He continued to stand behind his desk for a time, watching Proxmire retreat to the far end of the room but not out of it. Then, abruptly, he turned and walked across to the alcove where the bar was. He paused there, turning slightly, and said to me, “Would you care for a drink?”

“No, thank you,” I answered.

“Allan?”

Channing shook his head. “Not just now, Lou.” He seemed agitated, as if he found himself in a situation that he did not quite know how to cope with.

Martinetti poured four fingers of amber liquid from a decanter into a cut-crystal glass and returned to the desk. He sat down, and made a pyramid of his hands and rested his forehead on it for a long moment. Then he raised his head, looking directly at me.

“At ten o’clock this morning,” he said, without preamble, “a man dressed in a dark-blue business suit and carrying a briefcase entered the headmaster’s office at Sandhurst Military Academy in Burlingame. He introduced himself as a Mr. Edmonds, a member of the legal firm I employ, and showed a note written on my personal stationery to Mr. Young, the headmaster. The note said that Young was to release my son, Gary, to this Edmonds on a matter of the gravest personal importance. The note was ostensibly signed by me. Mr. Young summoned Gary from his class, and he and the man then left Sandhurst in a late-model station wagon.”

Martinetti picked up his glass and drank from it. It was very quiet in the dark room-and suddenly very cold. “At two this afternoon, when Allan and I returned from a round of golf at the Burlingame Country Club, there was a telephone call for me,” he went on. “A man’s voice said that unless I paid him a specified amount of money, at a time and place of which I would later be notified, I could look for the body of my son in the Bay.”

He was watching me intently now, waiting for my reaction. I avoided his eyes. I got out a cigarette and lit it and looked around for an ashtray. There were none. I put the match in my coat pocket. I could feel my lungs rebelling against the sharpness of the smoke, but the coughing did not start up again.

Martinetti said, “Do you understand what I’ve just told you? My son has been kidnapped.”

“I understand it,” I said. “Have you called the police yet?”

“No, and I don’t intend to.”

“Because of the threat?”

“That’s right.”

“They’re still the people you want to talk to.”

“No,” Martinetti said. “I want my son back safely, and to get him back I’ll follow any orders I’m given. No police.”

“Just why did you call me, Mr. Martinetti?” I asked him. “I have neither the facilities nor the inclination to investigate a kidnapping.”

“I don’t want you to investigate anything,” Martinetti said. There was an edge to his voice now, born of impatience and frustration and perhaps of fear.

“Then why?”

“The kidnapper wants a third party to make the money drop,” he said slowly. “I don’t know why. Maybe he’s afraid if I do it myself, I’ll panic or try something foolish. I don’t know.”

“How much do they want?”

He took a deep breath, held it, released it audibly. “Three hundred thousand dollars,” he said.

I tapped some cigarette ash into the palm of my hand. The silence seemed to build in the room. I said finally, “What kind of arrangements were you given?”

“The bills are to be in small denominations, nothing larger than a hundred. I suppose that’s standard procedure.”

“It’s the way this kind of thing is usually worked.”

“I’m to put the money into a plain suitcase. Then I’m to wait for further instructions.”

“Were you told when?”

“Tomorrow.”

“But no particular time?”

“No.”

I stared at a veined black marble pen set next to the telephone on his desk. I still could not meet his eyes. “Haven’t you got someone here who can make the delivery for you? Mr. Channing, maybe, or-”

“I’m sorry,” Channing said quickly from the couch. He had the kind of soft, sepulchral voice you come to expect from morticians. “Louis and I talked over that possibility, but I simply couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take that kind of responsibility.”

No, I thought, but it’s all right if I take it.