Brett Halliday - At the Point of a. 38

“At the beginning,” Shayne said.

“She’s a bright kid,” Gold agreed, giving her leg a pat.

“Who had the idea for the kidnapping, you?”

The question embarrassed Gold slightly. “It came up. They’ve been wanting to pull some kind of trick in this country. Everything sort of fitted in. There’s this oil sheik who had a standing invitation to visit some big muckymuck in Boca Raton. They found out when the committee was having the quarterly meeting in Miami Beach, and timed it to overlap. All right!” he said defensively. “But what they don’t realize is that this won’t cut into the flow of funds at all. Wait till you see next month’s totals. Every Jew in America will bring out his checkbook. I grant you-it’ll be a big boost for the Arabs if it works.” He smiled slightly. “But not if they blow it.”

“Explain that,” Shayne said, and Helen added, “Quickly?”

“Artie and me supplied the vehicles,” Gold explained, “but before I turned them over I stuck in a couple of bombs. Timed to go off just about now.”

“The ping-pong balls!” Helen said.

“Incendiaries. You know what we’re talking about, Shayne? All the arsonists have been using them lately.”

On the radio a voice began speaking in great excitement. When Shayne turned up the sound, it proved to be merely the regular announcer praising a liquid floor wax.

“Goddamn it,” Gold said, worried. “They wouldn’t hold back a piece of news like that. They’d put it out right away.”

The girl put in, “If anything’s wrong, Murray, isn’t it all the more reason for you and I to be heading out to sea?”

“I kept hearing how everything had to be timed, to the goddamned second,” Gold said. “A guy named Rashid. I saw him work at Ramleh, and the cat is good. He’d be a colonel in any army in the world. When he said something would happen at such and such a time, that’s when it happened or some heads got chopped. We got the cars to them at a quarter to eleven. Game-time was eleven sharp.”

“I was talking to the manager of the St. A. when they walked in,” Shayne said. “Eleven o’clock straight up.”

“Eleven forty-five now,” Gold said, checking the watch. “Even if they ran into trouble right away, we ought to be hearing about it. They were going to collect everybody in Solomon’s room. Nine men on the committee, but a couple aren’t getting in till this afternoon. They had everybody’s room number. Like with the manager, they were going to take his secretary and everybody else in the office, to keep the lid on as long as they could. Phase one was fifteen minutes. If they couldn’t find somebody, forget it. Then down to the lobby for the announcement. They had a bullhorn. Rashid figured out the best place to stand. Eleven-twenty. ‘I’m Rashid Abd El-Din, known to my friends as the Palestinian Superman. The vile Jews, blah, blah, blah. We want one million apiece, and we want to see it at the airport in exactly one hour, sixty minutes. An airplane, and get it gassed up and rolled out on a runway, all by itself, with a full crew. And no monkey business or all the Jews will get killed. Which they’re used to, of course.’ Any questions? No questions. Off to the airport.”

“Taking everybody?”

“Just the committee. There were eight Arabs to start with, one kid didn’t make it in time. Just about one on one. I tried to tell them it would take over an hour to scrape up that much cash. What do you think, Shayne?”

“Six or seven million? Banks, racetracks.”

“His big point was that he didn’t want to get into one of those long negotiations, with everybody armed on both sides and getting more and more nervous. That’s why he didn’t make any demands on Israel. Everybody knows they don’t pay blackmail, period. If they didn’t have the cash by the deadline, too bad for the hostages. The hour was supposed to start at eleven-twenty. So what’s happening? I set those timers for eleven-forty, to go off about halfway between the Beach and the airport. They’re distributed like this. Three Arabs in a limousine, the rest in a hearse, two in the front seat, two in back with the Jews. They’re bowling along at fifty or sixty miles an hour. Bang. The guy who sold me the ping-pong balls said those flames are going to shoot thirty feet in the air. The explosion comes up through the floorboards and takes out the driver. They’re going to rack up, aren’t they? That takes out the limo. The hearse slams on its brakes. Thirty seconds later, another bang. I jammed the back doors so they wouldn’t lock. They fly open and six or seven Jews and two Arabs spill out on the highway. I think we can take them, if we jump fast enough. There’s going to be plenty of confusion, and that’s all to the good. The bomb in the hearse, I put it in on the right, and hopefully that’s where Rashid is going to be riding. The others aren’t in his class.”

“Murray,” the girl said admiringly, “you know you’re sort of a genius? Now can I make a suggestion? While we’re talking why don’t I divide the money?”

“Shayne wants to be in on that.”

“Get it up off the floor where I can see it,” Shayne said. “Do it by packages, throw one over and keep one.”

“And don’t try any razzle-dazzle,” Gold said. “He said half, and if we don’t give him half he’ll hold it against us.”

Shayne stepped up the volume again. Fifty minutes had now passed since the Arabs walked into Manny Farber’s office. The St. Albans was one of the long row of Collins Avenue hotels, almost as closely spaced as the two-family houses in Homestead Beach. The Fontainebleau security officer had listened intently to Shayne’s call, and had seemed to take it seriously. So where were the police?

“One for you,” the girl said. “One for us. This is fun.”

“Any ideas, Shayne?” Gold said after a moment.

“Yeah,” Shayne said slowly. “Did these guys trust you?”

“Not an inch. Trust me? You know Barney, the bondsman. They told him how he could find me, and he had a good financial reason to do it. That way I’d be tied up so I couldn’t call the cops and have them waiting at the hotel. I sneaked out of it O.K., but it damn near worked.”

“So why would they give you the right timetable?”

Gold’s eyes slitted down. “You said they put the snatch on Farber exactly at eleven.”

“But they didn’t make an announcement in the lobby at eleven-twenty, or we’d know it by now. This is a new kind of operation for them. If they’re smart they’ll try to keep it quiet until they’re gone-all the way out of the country. After they picked out the hostages they wanted, I think they left the others locked up in the hotel. Helen said that you and Rashid were looking at diagrams. He wouldn’t need diagrams if he was really planning to walk out the front door with all the guns showing.”

“They have to run a press conference somewhere, why not at the hotel? They’re perfectly safe, nobody’s going to shoot at them as long as they’ve got those hostages. Be serious, an hour isn’t a hell of a lot of time to raise six million bucks. You mentioned the racetracks. The money’s there, but somebody’s going to have to persuade those guys.”

“This is political. The Arabs didn’t come here to make money.”

“I grant you, but why would they pass up six or seven million bucks? They have expenses, like everybody.”

“Maybe their minds don’t work like yours, Murray. If they can pull it off, they’ll be famous. Money will pour in.”

“One for Mike Shayne, one for us,” Helen murmured.

Gold closed his eyes briefly, so he wouldn’t be distracted. His forehead tightened.

“Give me another jolt of cognac.”

Shayne passed him the flask. Gold drank. His eyes opened.