Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

A pair of khaki trousers his only clothing, Adam accompanied me to the nurses’ station. The duty nurse waited for us with her hand over the telephone mouthpiece.

“Is there an extension?” I said.

She nodded at the glass-walled office behind the counter. “In there. If you want to, you can cradle the receiver on a speaker device, and it’ll broadcast like a radio.”

“Good,” I said. “You don’t happen to have a tape recorder too, do you?”

“Another nurse, Andrea, has a jam box, a big silver thing she hauls around to deafen her elders with. It also records. Andrea leaves her tapes in the drawer. You can tape over one of those—if you take responsibility for ruining a favorite of hers.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

At which point the nurse realized that Adam’s face was free of its bandages. “Oh, my God! Those weren’t supposed to come off yet. Dr. Ruggiero will flay me alive.”

“No, he won’t,” I said. “Mr. Montaraz is healing nicely.”

I led Adam into the office, found the jam box, rummaged up an unmarked tape, put it in the machine, and pressed the record button. Then I set the telephone receiver into the amplifier unit and depressed the lighted button on the base of the telephone. The nurse, having observed all this through the glass, hung up her phone and left to make a tour of the floor—efficient and discreet, that good woman.

“We’re here,” I told the caller.

“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked, two syllables that identified him: Craig Puddicombe. He had made no effort to disguise his voice. (If the restaurant business ever got too tame for me, maybe I could go into police work.)

I told Craig who I was.

“The first dude in history to let a hibber snake his old lady.”

“We were divorced when RuthClaire married Adam.”

“Yeah. You even played pimp for ’em, didn’t you? Now you’re in the hospital holding the hibber’s hand. Jesus, Mr. Loyd, you take the cake.”

“But you and Nancy took the child. What do you—?”

Puddicombe broke in: “Get your tape recorders all set up? Get a call off to the police? That why you took so goddamn long pickin’ up the phone?”

“Adam had to dress. His room’s at the far—”

“Stuff that, Mr. Loyd.” He said something to somebody in the room with him, but it was all muffled, indistinct. Then: “Prove to me the hibber’s really there.”

“How? You know he can’t talk.”

“He can sing, can’t he? He can hum like a rotary engine.”

“Craig, he’s had an operation. His face is bandaged. The entire lower portion of his face was remodeled.”

“He’ll still be stump-ugly to me. Have him hum through his bandages.”

I started to protest, but Adam took my handkerchief from my coat pocket, tied it around his face as a bandanna, and stepped to the amplifier to hum a Cokesbury hymn.

“That’s the hibber, all right—a mule brayin’ into a barrel.”

“Prove you’ve got Tiny Paul,” I said.

“How? You wanna hear him scream?”

Adam stopped humming—half lament, half yodel—and removed the bandanna. He shook his head in response to Craig’s last question.

“Never mind,” I said. “What do you want?”

“A ransom. If Mister and Missus Hibber give it to us, they’ll get their filthy little whatever-it-is back.”

“How much money, Craig?”

“Who said anything about money?”

This reply shocked me. What sort of ransom required no monetary payoff?

“Y’all still there?” Craig asked.

“Tell us your terms. We’re listening.”

Craig consulted with his accomplice. Then, as if reading from a script, he said, “We don’t want money. We don’t do violence. What we want is what’s right. You may think the brat’s been taken because his hibber daddy killed E. L. You may think we covet what the brat’s unnatural family has built up for itself since the hibber did that killin’. It ain’t so, though, neither of those things. We took the brat to make some undone justice get done. We took him to set some wrong things right.”

This nonsense scared me. “Come on, Craig, get to the point.”

“Have a little patience,” the amplifier said, mockingly polite. A paper rattled. “You get your little half-breed back if and when you do the following. First, Mister and Missus Hibber they stop livin’ together. Second, they tell the papers and the TV they’ve stopped and they regret the sinful example they’ve set decent whites and blacks all over the world by bringin’ their mongrel brat into it. Third, they—”

“Craig,” I pleaded.

“Third, they apologize to the parents, family, and widow of E. L. Teavers, my friend. And fourth, the hibber gives himself up for trial on charges of—” a meaningful pause—“uh, malicious homicide.”

“Craig, E. L. was trying to kill Adam. You and your crew had kidnapped us, for God’s sake—the same way you and Nancy have abducted Tiny Paul. Not a court in the world would convict Adam of anything but saving all our lives!”

“Look, we was just tryin’ to scare some sense into you. Nobody out to Snyder’s place was gonna get kilt—until your goddamn hibber chucked E. L. down that hole.”

“But E. L. was trying to do that to Adam, Craig!”

“Puttin’ your hibber down a hole didn’t kill him, did it? Him and his kind lived hundreds of damn centuries in caves. So puttin’ a hibber down a brick-kiln hole hurts it ’bout as much as tossin’ Br’er Rabbit into a damn briar patch. He popped back out, didn’t he? That proves it.”

Absurd. Puddicombe and I were working from entirely different sets of premises. I changed tacks: “Is that it? Four things to do to get T. P. back?”

“We got a fifth un.” Our tormentor rattled his prepared text. “Inasmuch as Mister and Missus Hibber have made big bucks from the dirty degenerates of American society, and are richer than all but the upright and godly ought to be, they’ve got to—” Craig halted. His fancy lead-in had taken some steam out of his delivery. “Inasmuch as all that, they’ve got to contribute fifty thousand dollars to ten different charities and political groups of our choosing. They’ll get the list on Monday or Tuesday. Each group gets at least three thousand, but—and this is big of us, now—Mister and Missus Hibber get to decide how to ladle out the twenty thousand left over after the first split.”

“Money. It comes down to money.”

“The money ain’t important, Mr. Loyd. It’s not for us, anyhow. It’s only ’cause they got it and don’t deserve it and need to give it to somebody who does—that’s why we’re makin’ ’em do it. They do it by check, too. We need to see the canceled checks as proof that everything’s been done like we asked. The list comin’ in the mail will explain the whole system.”

Angry, I said: “They won’t get T. P. back until the canceled checks come in?”

“Actually, not till after they’ve split up, broken their ungodly marriage, and lived apart long enough to show us they’ve really done it.”

“Craig, give us a time frame? How long will you hold Tiny Paul? There’s no give-and-take here. For you, it’s open-ended. For RuthClaire and Adam, it’s a nightmare. And if they’re living apart when you release the kid, who will you release him to?”

“To your ex-old lady, of course. The hibber don’t have any rights in this.”

“But how long , Craig. Play fair, damn it!”

“They’ll know when we do, won’t they?” And he hung up. The speaker on the amplifier was amplifying a dial tone. No way to trace the call. It had come through the hospital’s central switching system. So Craig Puddicombe and Nancy Teavers, with T. P. in their doubtful care, had sunk again into the impenetrable anonymity of a metropolitan area with nearly four million people—if they hadn’t made their call from Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, or one of the Carolinas. And even if they were still in Greater Atlanta, they had more than a hundred square miles of labyrinthine territory in which to go to ground.