Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

He let her have it. Let her have it but good, as they said, and Freedy knew why: because of how good you felt, doing it.

Freedy taped her arm, now limp, back up to the pipe, taped her head to it too, to prevent that head-banging shit. He popped the last andro, tweaked the last of the meth, stopped the bleeding; his bleeding. New plan. Action central.

Peter Abrahams

Crying Wolf

The ransom note.

It defied Nat’s understanding, like a superficially simple poem packed with allusions he didn’t even know were there. He was sure of only one thing: it wasn’t Grace’s writing. Nat still believed Grace might have wrecked the two rooms in their cave; could even imagine Lorenzo dying in the fray; but could not accept that she’d written that note on the back of the centaur painting. A milion sounds nice. Right here soon say by dark. Call the cops and she die$. Not her. Could she have disguised her written self to persuade her father and Andy Ling that a kidnapping had really taken place? Maybe, Nat thought, but not like this. The longer he stared at the note, the stranger it got-didn’t even read like a ransom note, left out all those points Wags had made; and the middle sentence almost didn’t make sense. Something else about the note bothered him even more, something he couldn’t identify.

So when Izzie said, “I suppose you’re going to say that’s her own writing,” he said, “No.”

On the way out, Izzie went by Lorenzo’s body without a glance.

Grace and Izzie’s room. Even with what he’d just seen, Nat still wouldn’t have been surprised to see Grace there. She wasn’t. Izzie snatched up the phone.

“Calling your father?” Nat said.

“Who else?”

“To say what?”

“To say what? That my sister’s been kidnapped.”

“We already told him that.”

“So? Now it’s true.”

“But-”

“But what?”

“He didn’t believe it.”

“The room, the note-that changes everything.”

“Will he think so?”

“What are you talking about?”

Odd, to have to explain her own father to her. “We need more facts,” he said.

“What kind of facts?”

“I don’t know. We have to think. Who could have done this?”

“Kidnappers, for God’s sake. Do you expect them to identify themselves?”

“Have there been any other attempts?”

“Other attempts?”

“In the past-threats against your family.”

“From whom?”

“Workers with a grievance, business rivals-you’d know better than me.”

Izzie, punching out the numbers, gave him a quick look. “All you’re doing is complicating this. It’s simple. We need that money and we need it now.”

She reached someone, spoke a word or two into the phone, hung up. It rang within the minute.

“Dad?” She pressed the speaker button.

“Yes?” said Mr. Zorn. Nat heard traffic noises-he was back in the city-and impatience in his tone.

Izzie told him about their place in the tunnels and what had happened to it, told him about the ransom note, told him they needed the money and needed it now, told him that this time it was real.

Silence, followed by a muffled conversation; Nat thought he heard Andy Ling’s voice. Mr. Zorn came back on the line.

“What did the note say?”

“The exact words?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t remember the exact words, but-”

“I do,” Nat said.

“Ah,” said Mr. Zorn. “Nat. Let’s hear them.”

Nat quoted the ransom demand verbatim.

Pause. “Would you repeat that, please?”

Nat repeated it.

Another pause. Then Mr. Zorn laughed. In the background, Andy said, “A million sounds nice,” and started laughing too, a low, pleasant laugh of real amusement, different from Mr. Zorn’s, Nat couldn’t help realizing even at that moment: Mr. Zorn’s laugh had an edge, almost like a weapon.

“Is something funny?” Izzie said.

“Kids,” said Mr. Zorn: “It’s enough now.”

Click.

Izzie paled, then went red. He’d never seen her face like that; she was almost a different person. For a moment, he thought she was going to throw the phone across the room. Grace probably would have. The color faded slowly from her face. She turned to him and said, “Doesn’t anyone understand what’s happening here? She’s going to die. I can feel it.”

“What about trying Professor Uzig now?” Nat said.

“Stop calling him that,” Izzie said. “He’s just Leo. What about him?”

“Maybe he can persuade your father.”

“He didn’t come through for you.”

“This is different.”

They brought Professor Uzig down to the cave. He shone the flashlight they’d given him here and there; not lingering, Nat noticed, on the wreckage, Lorenzo, or even the ransom note; but more on the undamaged parts: the gilded molding, the velvet chairs and couches, the fine old rugs. “My God,” he said. “This couldn’t be better.” Izzie shone her light at him. He shielded his eyes. “Did you say there were candles?” he said.

Nat and Izzie lit some. Professor Uzig gazed at the high ceiling, with its coffered woodwork, carved with leaves, flowers, grapes, horns of plenty. “Metaphorically, historically, culturally-it’s perfect, perfect in so many ways.”

“What do you mean?”

“You must know, if you’ve been coming here. What shall I call it? A time capsule, and planted with the same sort of deliberation. Can you read that?” He pointed to the Greek writing on the wall. “From the Republic,” he said, reading it in Greek and then translating: “Let early education be a sort of amusement.”

Didn’t Plato have a cave? This can be Nietzsche’s. Izzie had said that, when they were naming this place.

“There were social clubs at Inverness in the nineteenth century,” Professor Uzig was saying. “Not fraternities-more in the Oxford-Cambridge style. They had a powerful influence, almost independent of the college. The board of trustees outlawed them after World War One, bought up their houses, Goodrich Hall being one. There must be a direct route into Goodrich, sealed off.”

“There is,” Nat said.

Professor Uzig nodded. “Sealed off by the club members, of course, in order to preserve this secret space. A kind of defiance, do you see, an underground resistance forever in opposition to whatever modernizing forces they despised. Metaphorically, historically, culturally perfect, as I said.” He eyed them. “And motivationally,” he added.

“Motivationally?” said Izzie.

Nat felt it coming.

“There couldn’t be a more seductive setting for dreaming up little schemes like yours,” said Professor Uzig. “A place like this can almost be said to dream them up by itself. And the consequent destruction in light of the failure of the scheme makes perfect sense.”

“Mr. Zorn called you?” Nat said.

“I was hanging up when you knocked on my door.”

“You’re saying you don’t believe us?” Izzie said. “What about the goddamn note?” She took him by the front of his tweed jacket-seized him, really-and yanked him toward it. Professor Uzig, barrel-chested, fit for his age, didn’t like being yanked, resisted, but not successfully.

“Yes,” he said, smoothing his jacket when Izzie had released him, “I heard about this note.” He looked it over. All texts, as Nat recalled, were transparent to him. “Don’t you realize you’re starting to embarrass yourselves?”