Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

The letter appeared in the Constitution on Thursday morning and in the Journal that afternoon. Adam had not let anyone read it beforehand, and although it technically fulfilled all the ransom demands not yet complied with, I was afraid its tone and turn of phrase might backfire on all of us. The letter seemed to embody the first extended use of irony and sarcasm that Adam had ever essayed.

Special Agent Hammond visited Paradise Farm shortly before midnight on Thursday. He told us that Niedrach had doubts similar to mine about the efficacy of Adam’s “Apology & Confession.” If Craig were in a touchy mood or if he thought Adam had played him false, T. P. might suffer the consequences. Or the letter might lead Craig to contact the Montarazes, thus multiplying the clues about his and Nancy’s whereabouts and inadvertently laying the groundwork for their capture.

Southern Bell Security had cooperated with the GBI in setting up a trap on my telephone by installing a pin register—a device capable of holding a line open even after the caller has hung up—in the office of the Beulah Fork exchange, but had not bothered to put a trap on the phones in the Montaraz house on Hurt Street because of Atlanta’s prohibitive number of exchanges. So I did not see how Hammond could say another call from Craig might prove his ruin. Besides, it was hard to imagine him calling Paradise Farm. He’d have to have a sudden prescient hunch about Adam’s hiding place.

“What in my letter could give offense?” Adam asked Hammond.

For someone able to grasp the metaphysical depths of various spiritual issues, Adam was curiously obtuse on this score. I told him his expression of regret felt tongue in cheek, his apology a clever indictment of Teavers, and his offer to give himself up a parody of genuine confession.

“You’ve complied with the letter but not the spirit of Craig’s demands.”

“How can I comply with the spirit of demands which I abhor?”

“You can’t,” Hammond said. “But you can pretend to.”

“I am no good at this pretending,” Adam growled. A tear formed in his eye. He blinked, and the tear slid moistly down the gully between his cheek and his habiline muzzle. “I can no longer make-believe I am happy apart from my wife. I can no longer make-believe my praying is helpful. I can no longer make-believe the God of Abraham and also of the converted Paul cares very much about my family’s dilemma.”

Hammond said, “We’re here, Mr. Montaraz, caring as much as we can.”

Seated at my dinette table with a bottle of Michelob, Adam broke down. He sobbed like an affronted toddler, his fragile lower face scrunching around alarmingly. I feared he was about to undo some aspect of the surgery that had “humanized” him.

“You should read the Book of Job,” Hammond said.

Adam shrugged aside the special agent’s hand. “Quiet the hell up!” he wheezed at Hammond. “My people have known two million years of trial, even to the need of hiding from our own descendants—but not even as free person in U.S. of America can I escape further tribulation. So I beg you most imploringly, ‘Quiet the hell up!’” He flung his beer bottle between Hammond and me at the fridge. By some miracle, it failed to break, but amber liquid sloshed everywhere, and the habiline got up and left the room.

“Touchy tonight,” said Hammond, not unsympathetically.

“Have you guys made any progress up there? What about Craig’s family here in town? Have you talked to them?”

“We haven’t talked to Puddicombe’s mother or any of his other family members because if we did, they’d try to tip him off. It’s that kind of family.”

“What’s Niedrach doing? And Davison? And their FBI liaison? Nothing’s happened since that letter came.” I was mopping spilled beer with paper towels.

Hammond tore two sheets of toweling from the roll and knelt next to the refrigerator to help. “They’re working. We’re all working. Sometimes you need a lucky break.” He carried the pieces of sopped toweling to the waste basket. “By the way, your friend Caroline Hanna told me to tell you hello. She’s over there with your ex-wife every moment she can spare away from her work—a friend indeed, that lady.”

God, I thought, they’re comparing notes. “Thanks. So what do we do now?”

“Sit tight, Mr. Loyd. Sit tight.”

Adam and RuthClaire had written the ten checks demanded by Craig’s letter for five thousand dollars each. Although these were big contributions by the standards of most American taxpayers, none by itself would seem remarkable coming from national figures of the Montarazes’ suspected wealth. The GBI agents had dissuaded them from writing any check for an amount conspicuously larger than the others for fear that Craig would use this disparity as an excuse to make further demands. He seemed to enjoy the game he was playing, as if the rush of making complex demands and having them carried out was a well-deserved bonus for his pursuit of “justice.”

By the end of the week, we learned, the Montarazes’ bank in DeKalb County began making payments on some of these drafts. STORC, the Klairvoyant Empire, the Rugged White Survivalists, the Methodist Children’s Home, and Aubrey O’Seamons had wasted little time cashing their checks. As a result, it might be possible to put all ten canceled checks in that display case in Lenox Square a few days ahead of schedule. Late Friday night, in fact, exactly one week after the kidnapping, Hammond informed Adam and me that the FBI had taken several discreet steps to have the checks in place by midweek. There was no sense delaying their availability to the kidnappers until the second Monday in August if they had already cleared. Whether Craig would let T. P. go before Monday was problematic, but we all agreed that it was worth a try. Meanwhile, video surveillance equipment had been concealed in front of Rich’s by specialists working in the mall after regular business hours.

Adam and RuthClaire traded letters during their separation. Bilker mailed them from random sites around the city, while I sent all of Adam’s billets-doux to Caroline Hanna’s apartment so she could carry them to Hurt Street when she visited RuthClaire. We took these precautions because Niedrach believed that Craig would interpret any sign of contact between the Montarazes, even from afar, as a violation of their promise to live apart. Phone calls were also out.

Caroline and I were under no such ban. So long as I placed my calls to her from the West Bank rather than Paradise Farm, no one objected to our talking to each other. Also, Caroline took pains to call me only at the restaurant. If she phoned during business hours, I clambered up to my sweltering second-floor storage room to take the call on the extension there. Downstairs, Livia George would hang up, and Caroline and I would jabber like furtive teenagers. The heat of the storage room, with its low musty cot and its listing pyramids of cardboard boxes and vegetable crates, heightened my sense of the illicitness of our hurried conversations. But I liked that feeling. It was absurd, feeling like a teen again, but it was splendid, too, an unexpected benefit of T. P.’s kidnapping that in full daylight I could in no way square with the horror of that event.

On Saturday night, Caroline called at 11:30, just as Hazel and Livia George were about to go out the front door. But with only an ancient rotating floor fan to keep me from collapsing of heat stroke, I took the call upstairs, anyway.

“Talk to me, kid.”

“Not for long, Paul. Listen: we’re hanging on, and Ruthie’s unbelievably self-possessed. Me, I’m done in.”

“Me, too. Frazzled. Big crowd tonight.”

“Adam?”

“I’ve begun to worry about him, Caroline. His odd amalgam of religious beliefs—his faith, if you want to call it that—seems to be deserting him. He walks around my place like Roderick Usher, morose and supersensitive. Know what he told me this morning? ‘I’m a lightning rod for human cruelty.’ His exact words.”