The idea came to Werner French in the middle of the third martini. His second before-dinner drink usually made him gloomy. If he stopped there, he was sure to stay gloomy the whole evening. He always recovered on the third. As he tasted the cold gin poured over fresh ice, he felt that everything would undoubtedly turn out all right. He had a job, a car, a girl. Ninety percent of the population was willing to settle for that. True, it was a terrible job, the car was a rusted-out Chevy. But the girl was first-class-Pam Heller, a spirited blonde who could laugh him out of anything. A marvelous ass, and a mind that jumped like BB’s being shaken inside a tin can.
He stood still in the middle of the room. Pam looked at him from the couch. The air-conditioning was laboring tonight, and she was wearing nothing but a one-button blouse.
“I know that look,” she said. “You’ve come up with a solution.”
He said slowly, “If we were willing to break the habits of a lifetime-”
“Tell me.”
“What you said a minute ago-that the only way I’m going to raise any money is from a loan shark. An electric bulb went on. Something I saw in the Times.”
The New York Times, Werner believed, was the only newspaper in the country that contained any news, and he read the air-mail edition daily. Putting down his drink, he hunted through the drift of old papers until he found the item. A bookmaker in one of the New York boroughs had been abducted as he left for mass on a Sunday morning. The ransom demand was a modest $150,000. The kidnapped man’s family and friends had raised it by suppertime. They just happened to have it lying around.
“One hundred and fifty thousand,” Werner repeated, “in the back of the coat closet.”
Pam looked up, puzzled. “I don’t see it.”
“A bookie. You notice they take a light tone. They don’t seem to think it was such a dastardly crime. A bookie is already on the wrong side of the law. Anything that happens to him is sort of O.K. He’s fair game.”
“Honey, that’s reading a lot into four paragraphs.”
“No,” Werner insisted. “If he was a lawyer or a storekeeper, they’d be indignant because the hundred and fifty would be real money. But this was a bookie’s money, bail money. Not the same thing. Slick and fast. The FBI men don’t get called in for twenty-four hours. Up to that time, it’s the local cops. They wouldn’t care that much.”
“Then let’s do it. Do you know any bookies?”
Werner laughed and resumed his pacing. “A loan shark would be better. Cash always on hand. They’re unpopular with everybody.”
“Do you know any loan sharks? I don’t suppose they advertise in the yellow pages.”
“You don’t think I’m serious. Just because my old man peddles municipal bonds and I have a degree from Columbia School of Architecture, I’m doomed to stay honest. It doesn’t follow. I could do it easily.”
“Baby, you know you couldn’t.”
He sat down, no longer laughing. “Well, hell. Cocktail party conversation.”
She was totally relaxed, balancing her glass on her stomach. “But we have to do something. I’ve got that great job answering the phone, and twice a day I’m given the enormous honor of doing a letter for the vice president in charge of young girls. Who gave in to a kinky impulse today and squeezed my breasts because I’d made the tactical error of going to work not wearing a bra-”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“One tiny incident among many. It’s part of the atmosphere when you work in an office. Every day from somebody. If not a tweak, a look. Why is it all one way? How would he like it if I came up to him and squeezed his cock?”
“He might like it.”
“No, he’d fire me. So I quit. I’m going back to New York and take my chances.”
Werner said stiffly after a moment, “It’s your privilege. We’re not married.”
Nothing was said for a time. Then Pam stirred.
“Do you mind at all?”
“Damn right I mind. I’ve tried New York. The building business is so frozen up there-”
“I know,” she said more gently. “What I’m edging into, because something is right for you doesn’t make it automatically right for me. Things are just-closing in. One year from now, do you want to look back and see three hundred and sixty-five days like today? Or yesterday?”
“We made love a couple of times yesterday, I seem to remember.”
“And when it was over, it was over.”
He made an effort to get some of the good feeling back. “Will you stay if I kidnap somebody and make a lot of money?”
“Conceivably. How much should we ask?”
Whirling like a gunfighter, he pointed an index finger at the side of her head. “One hundred thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, or I’ll put a bullet in your ear.”
“That’s not the way it’s done. A note to the wife. One hundred thousand if you want to see your husband alive, and don’t tell the fuzz.”
“True. For the note we cut words out of the newspaper.”
“But not the Times. That would give you away.”
They did some more improvising, causing the idea to lose what little reality it had had to begin with. But God, if they could pull it off! It was a lovely dream.
Werner had had his degree for two years, and he hadn’t set foot in an architectural office. They let him press his nose to the window and watch the draughtsmen, but that was about all. They weren’t hiring, they were firing. Firms were merging and shutting down. Housing starts were at their lowest point in thirty years.
And Werner, again in the middle of a third martini, had come up with a great idea. Nobody would pay him to design a house unless he had done a house for somebody else, so they could see how his mind worked. So the thing to do, for Christ’s sake, was to borrow money and build a house with himself as client, general contractor, and carpenter. He could sell at cost, below the market, because the object wasn’t to make a profit, but to get pictures in the architectural magazines, to become known. He needed $60,000. He went to bankers and got down on his knees. A flat no, everywhere.
“A fantasy,” Pam said. “We’ll never do anything so adventurous. We might as well fuck. That we know how to do.”
Later Werner put on the hamburgers, this being his night to cook. Pam, still in her one-article costume, perched on the counter to watch.
“You know I meant that about New York.”
“I had that feeling.”
“I have friends there. Here they’re all your friends. I’m told I can transfer my unemployment.”
“By friends, you mean Les.”
She looked at the end of her burning cigarette. “I think he’s still there.”
“Why shouldn’t he still be there? A terrific Brooklyn Heights apartment with a terrace where he can raise his own chives. Expense-account lunches. People ask him to parties-”
She slid off the counter and took him around the waist from behind. “It’s so grubby here, sweetheart. Let’s try being in different places for a while.” He turned the hamburgers. “I thought of somebody who could recommend the right loan shark. That cop, Downey.”
Her fingers stopped moving. “You mean bring him in on it?”
“In the planning stage. For instance, how about guns? They’re supposed to be so easy to get, but you wouldn’t want to use one that was registered in your name. When Downey was here for supper that time, he kept talking about how he hated those people.”
“With a passion,” she agreed.
“They have contempt for the law. They don’t deserve to be protected by the law. Civil liberties for hoodlums? Don’t be naive.”
She let go. “But boy, how would you bring something like that up?”
“Ask a hypothetical question.”
That was all until after dinner. Their eyes met from time to time and jumped apart. Werner really was crazy about this girl. He wasn’t sure why. As the songwriters keep saying, the thing is a mystery. She would be a terrible person to go into a kidnapping with, where close timing was essential. She was invariably late. They never got to a movie in time for the titles. He knew she meant it about going to New York. She meant everything she said in that tone of voice. One day in New York and she would be back with Les Carter, the embodiment of everything Werner detested. Bullfight posters on the walls. Wine talk all the time, a subject Les didn’t know shit about in Werner’s opinion.
Sergeant Jack Downey had come into their life five weeks ago and left it again almost immediately. They came home from a late pizza to find that their house had been thoroughly looted. Luckily Pam had been wearing her good rings. The main thing they lost was the stereo, which dated back to architectural school when Werner was still in his mother’s good graces. Sergeant Downey showed up to make them feel better. He had picked up after thousands of these petty break-ins. It happened to everybody, he told them, and there wasn’t much you could do. He had hooded gray eyes, heavily creased skin. Whenever he finished one cigar, he lit up another, and they were exceptionally foulsmelling cigars. But Werner, who had sensitive antennae for such things, caught a funny vibration between the policeman and Pam. Among male movie actors, she preferred the veterans, the Charles Bronsons and Robert Mitchums, who had played the same part for decades and acquired a kind of solid strength and authority. Downey’s eyes had looked at every kind of depravity, and nothing impressed him anymore. He gave Pam a straight look when he was leaving. The look meant: “If you’re serious, fix a time and place and I’ll be there.”
He dropped in a week later to report the recovery of a trackload of hi-fi components. They didn’t include Werner’s, and he probably knew that. He probably also knew that Werner worked late Tuesday nights. Werner arrived to find them drinking gin-and-tonics in the kitchen. Downey was telling her some of his career highlights. He had taken his jacket off, and the gun showed. He ended up staying for supper. If he called again, Pam didn’t mention it. She made the rules in that area.
In bed, after turning off the light, Werner said abruptly, “In plain English. You’re leaving?”
“I really am,” she said quietly. They were lying on their backs under the sheet, watching headlights move across the ceiling. “I bought the ticket on the way home. I haven’t been brooding about it exactly. It just struck me all at once that I can’t live this way.”
“It’s been nine months. Would you consider rounding out the year?”
“Darling, I can’t. That would include my twenty-fourth birthday, and I take birthdays seriously. You don’t really want to kidnap anybody, do you?”
“I guess I really don’t. The martinis were talking.”
“I keep thinking about those people who kidnapped the bookie. They weren’t professionals. Professionals would go for higher stakes. They were people like us, Werner! People who needed a specific sum and couldn’t get it any other way. They’ll never do it again. It took a certain amount of planning, but a hell of a lot less than goes into designing a house. We’d want to research it carefully to be sure of picking the right person. That’s why I think Downey’s such a marvelous idea. He must have a list of every loan shark in town.”
The lifting effect of the gin was completely gone, and the headache was closing in. “How much do you think we’d have to pay him?”
“A full third.”
“The whole idea is to keep it small. Finish in twenty-four hours. Pam, seriously-can you see yourself putting a gun in somebody’s ribs and telling him to keep quiet and he won’t be hurt?”
“Not yet. It makes me sort of shivery. But if you really want some honesty, I feel shivery about New York, too.”
“Then don’t go, stupid.”
“Werner, I have to. Either that or give up.”
“We’ve spent some nice Sunday mornings in this bed.”
Her hand gripped his under the sheet. “You know I’m not going to turn into one of those dumb wives.”
“Les is pretty bossy with women. You’d have to admire his taste in wines.”
“Did I say I’m going back to Les? He was trying to change at the end, but God knows he had a long way to go. I prefer it with you. You know that. But not the way it is now.”
“We’d have to rent another house under another name. A different car. Steal one maybe. Think of some clever way to collect the ransom.”
“But not too clever. And wear masks.”
They were testing each other. Pam was the one who would have to approach Downey. That was the delicate part because of the real possibility that he might pretend to play along, fattening them up for the table-a standard police technique, as they both knew. It would be necessary to feel him out over a number of meetings. Meanwhile she would be postponing her departure, and Werner had a faint hope that even if the thing with Downey didn’t work out, she would change her mind about leaving.
They had a spaghetti party. Pam called Downey and told him her friends wouldn’t believe she knew a real flesh-and-blood detective, and would he drop in and prove it? Werner had reconciled himself to the fact that they couldn’t be sure of Downey-and even then they wouldn’t be altogether sure-until Pam had been to bed with him a few times. He didn’t like it, but he liked her New York idea even less. He managed to be away the next weekend, looking for work in Tampa. There was as little work in his field in Tampa as there was in Miami. On Monday, Pam reported that Downey had a pragmatic attitude to the matter of under-the-table income. He didn’t make regular collections, like many cops. The whole idea of being paid off by those vermin was repugnant to him. He took occasionally, but they didn’t pay him. He took. He didn’t want to co-exist. He wanted to wipe them out. That was his motivation. And in spite of the Nice Nellies and their regulations, he had wiped out a few! He had pulled his twenty-five years, and he could retire any time. But he wanted to make one clean score before he went, to supplement the pension. And loan sharks, it turned out, were high on his list, just below heroin pushers.