Protocol for a Kidnapping Read online

  He turned and grasped the bridle of Arrie’s horse and we moved out of the shed. The man with the lantern closed the doors behind us. The horses picked their way through the snow which got steadily deeper. Nobody spoke and the only sounds were those of the horses when they snorted and the creaking of the wooden saddles and the leather stirrups.

  Ahead of us the Italian used a flashlight to pick his way through the trees. Sometimes its beam illuminated large gray boulders. The path, if that’s what it was, led steeply upward and the horses snorted and shuddered and blew their frosty breath into the icy air. I wondered how cold it was. I knew it was well below freezing and my wet feet were growing numb. I wore gloves and the tweed topcoat, but except for that, I was dressed to spend an evening in some cozy bar, not on top of an animal who moved as if his feet had piles.

  The path narrowed and occasionally the branch of a pine, a fir, or some other coniferous brand would belt me across the face, leaving a bitter taste of resined snow. Ahead of me I could make out the dim outline of Gordana as she jogged and weaved in her saddle.

  The path or trail became even steeper in grade and I had to lean forward as my pony took small, jarring jumps to get from one level to the next. He seemed to know what he was doing so I held on to the saddle and let him do it. My right coat sleeve occasionally brushed against an outcropping of rock. I poked my left hand out, but it felt nothing. Just space. Ahead the flashlight beam bobbed and jittered in the blackness.

  I was straining to keep my eyes on Gordana’s outline when her horse stumbled and she fell from the saddle with a long shrill scream. I slid off my horse into almost two feet of snow and floundered toward the sound. I could see almost nothing. My left foot slipped and I felt myself falling before an arm grabbed me around the neck and pulled me back over the sharp edge of some rock that dug into my back. It was the Italian. He flashed his light into my face and said, “Was that you that screamed?”

  “The girl,” I said.

  He aimed his flashlight down and I could see that we were on a narrow ledge, not more than seven feet wide that cropped out from the side of almost vertical rock cliff.

  “If she went over, she’s gone,” the Italian said in a no-nonsense tone.

  He flashed his light down over the edge of the trail and nine feet below us we saw Gordana crouched on a narrow ledge, clinging to the side of the rock with hands that seemed able to find something to hold to when there was nothing in sight. Her face was turned up toward us, her mouth a black, round O of despair.

  “Don’t move, kid,” the Italian said to her softly. “Call the big guy, the good-looking one,” he said to me. I yelled for Knight.

  “She’s not bad, is she?” the Italian said. “In fact, she’s a beauty.” He could have been commenting on a dozen daisies.

  Knight knelt down beside us. “See her down there?” the Italian said, shining his light on Gordana.

  “Uh,” Knight said.

  “Well, you take a leg and I take a leg and we lower St. Ives down so that he can grab her and then we pull them both back up. How’s that?”

  “Succinct,” Knight said. “You ready?” he asked me.

  “Did I ever tell you about me and heights?” I said. “I don’t function well.”

  “You got a better idea?” the Italian said.

  “None.”

  “Get the other American,” the Italian said. I yelled for Wisdom this time and when he got there the Italian handed him the flashlight. “Keep it right on her,” he said. Wisdom lay on his belly in the snow and shined the light on Gordana whose mouth was now opening and closing silently as if she were gasping great gulps of air.

  The Italian took my right leg and Knight took my left one. I felt myself being lowered over the side. I didn’t see anything because I had my eyes closed. I didn’t open them until I heard someone yelling my name.

  “Goddamn it, St. Ives, grab her hands!” Wisdom yelled.

  I looked down. Gordana had released her hold on the side of her cliff and was stretching her hands up to me. I tried for them and our fingers brushed, but we missed.

  “Please,” she cried, “please.”

  I tried again, stretching as far as I could, but again our fingertips just brushed and this time she lost what balance she had and started to fall and then she screamed and somehow I lunged and caught her left wrist with my right hand. I held on until I got my left hand around her wrist. I had her then, but I knew it wouldn’t last long because her wrist was wet and it was beginning to slip through my hands.

  “Pull, damn you,” I yelled and I began to feel them lifting us slowly, but not fast enough because all I now had was her hand and it was beginning to go. “Faster,” I screamed and they tried and her nails dug into my palms as she fought against dying.

  There wasn’t anything I could do. I looked into her face which was full of mute pleading that begged me not to let her go, but all I had were her fingers now and they began to slip away. And then someone landed on my back, his legs locked around my waist. It was the Italian and he grabbed Gordana’s wrist just as her fingers slipped from my grasp. Using his legs to climb with, he worked his way up over my hips dragging Gordana after him. I could hear Knight and Wisdom swear as they pulled on my legs which now supported both Gordana and the Italian. Then I was hanging only by one leg as someone grabbed the Italian and pulled him up. I closed my eyes again.

  “Who’s got me?” I called.

  “I have, I think,” Wisdom said.

  “Could you sort of pull me up, if it’s not too much bother?”

  “Wait a second.”

  “Stick your other leg up,” Knight said.

  “I thought it was,” I said and felt hands on my right ankle. They began to pull.

  “How’s the view?” Wisdom said.

  “Vertiginous,” I said, proud that I could think of the word, and then I was over the edge and lying in the snow next to Gordana. Her face was turned toward me and she was crying.

  “Thank you, Philip,” she said softly. “Thank you so much.”

  “I almost dropped you,” I said.

  “You were very brave.”

  I smiled a little and tried to remember if anyone had ever told me that before.

  25

  WE HAD STOPPED. MY pony jerked his head and snorted again. The flashlight bobbed its way back toward me and the Italian caught the bridle of my pony.

  “This is it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You walk from here.”

  I slid down from the horse into a couple of feet of snow. My feet were numb.

  “I don’t see a hell of a lot,” I said.

  The Italian shined his flashlight ahead and it revealed a large gray boulder. “You go around that rock and up about fifty feet and you’re there.”

  “The castle?”

  He sighed as if he were sick of the whole mess. I was ready to agree with him. “It’s not a castle. It’s just part of what’s left of a castle, one of the main halls. They turned it into a kind of a hunting lodge and there’re a lot of rooms upstairs that they taught the kids in when it was a school. We just used the main hall.”

  “Where’s Killingsworth?” I said.

  “By the fire.”

  “Just sitting there?”

  “You can untie him.”

  “What about the horses?”

  “What about them?”

  “I was wondering how we’d get back.”

  The Italian shined his light in my face. Then he flicked it off. I was blinded—or might as well have been. “How you get back is your problem,” he said.

  “My problem is making sure that you don’t get back too soon. The horses go with us.” He said something then in Serbo-Croatian and he got a guttural answer from a voice I hadn’t heard before.

  “This is my partner,” the Italian said. “You don’t have to see what he looks like, do you?”

  “I’ll just imagine something,” I said.

  “Okay. You get the wom
en off and I’ll get the rest of them.”

  I waded through the snow to Gordana’s pony. “We walk from here,” I said and reached up and helped her down. She seemed weak. “Just stand here by your horse.”

  Arrie was already down from hers. “What’s going on?” she said.

  “We walk the rest of the way,” I said. “It’s not far.”

  “Who was the man who came by?” she said.

  “The Italian’s partner,” I said. “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “No,” she said. “Should I’ve?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  I could hear the rest of them talking as they dismounted. Then the Italian came up to us and took the reins of Arrie’s horse. He handed me the flashlight. “We got another one,” he said.

  I started to shine the flashlight around but he forced it down. “You don’t really wanta get a look at him, do you?” the Italian said.

  “I don’t give a damn about him. I just want to see if you’ve collected them all.”

  “They’re right behind me,” he said.

  I raised my voice. “All right. We have to walk about fifty feet. I’ll go first. Then the women. Knight, you come last. Okay?”

  “Fine,” Knight said. “I’m freezing.”

  “Everybody is,” I said.

  “There’re some tins of stuff to eat up there and there should be enough wood to last you till morning,” the Italian said.

  “When we walk back,” I said.

  “I need the edge,” he said. “You object?”

  “Would it do any good?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t object.”

  I shined the light in the Italian’s face. He slapped his hand over his eyes. “Christ,” he said.

  “Wait here until I take a look around that boulder,” I said. “I just want to make sure that there’s really something up there.”

  I waded through the snow and went around the boulder. The beam of the flashlight didn’t carry far, but the trail widened through the trees and up ahead there was a large dark mass of something. It could have been a castle or a silent herd of elephants. I turned and made my way back.

  “There’s something up there,” I said.

  “It’s what I said it was,” the Italian said, his voice edged with exasperation. “You just go around that boulder and on about fifty feet and there’s a big wooden door. It’s not locked. You go through that and you’re home. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said and led the two horses around me down the trail. He didn’t bother to say good-bye.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  We rounded the boulder and waded through the snow for fifty feet until we came to a wall built of wide blocks of gray stone. I shined the flashlight over it and the wall curved slightly. I shined it up and the wall seemed to go up forever. The wooden door that the Italian had promised was there and it was large enough to drive a school bus through. I tugged at the door, but nothing happened. I pushed and it opened easily. I went through followed by Arrie and Gordana, then Wisdom, Tavro, and Knight.

  The flashlight revealed an immense bare room with no windows. The walls were coated with a thick gray plaster that looked as if it had been slapped on by hand and smoothed with a stiff brush. A flight of stone stairs with no railing curved up. A dim flickering light came from the top of the stairs. I started up them.

  “Look at St. Ives,” Wisdom whispered hoarsely, “not a nerve in his body.”

  “You could follow a man like that through hell itself,” Knight said in a deep, reverent voice that almost had me wishing that he wasn’t such a good actor.

  At the top of the stairs was another large wooden door built of thick planks that was half open. I pushed it all the way open. Across from me, not more than forty feet or so, was a fireplace—the kind that you could walk into and give the steer a couple of turns if it needed it. It made the five-foot logs that burned in it look like a campfire. I glanced up and the ceiling was there all right, not more than twenty-five feet away. The floor was made of slate slabs. I guessed the room itself to be almost sixty feet long and to my right was another stone staircase without railings that ran up the wall and ended at a landing. To my left were tall narrow windows that reached almost from floor to ceiling. They were leaded, but some of the panes were broken. In front of the fireplace was a rough wooden table with benches on either side. Next to the table was an ordinary straight-backed wooden chair. A man sat in it with his hands tied to its arms. He stared at me and I stared back at Amfred Killingsworth, United States Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

  I nodded at Killingsworth who only continued to stare at me as I turned and called down the stairs. “Come on up, there’s nobody here but the ambassador.” It wasn’t a bad line.

  I walked across the room. “Hello, Killingsworth,” I said.

  His mouth worked a little before the words came out. I was sure that there would be plenty of them. “You’re Phil … Phil St.—uh—”

  “Ives,” I said. “St. Ives.”

  “You used to work for me.”

  “Until you fired me.”

  “Did I?” he said.

  “In Chicago.”

  “I remember now.”

  I examined the ropes that bound him to the chair. “I’ll get you out of these as soon as I get something to cut them with. They been treating you all right?”

  “It’s been a terrible ordeal,” he said and I knew that he was feeling fine.

  “Rough, huh?”

  Before he could answer the rest of them trooped into the room and headed for the fireplace with only a glance at Killingsworth. If his eyes had popped when they saw me, they bulged at the sight of Tavro and Gordana. Tavro nodded vaguely at Killingsworth as he warmed his hands before the fire. Gordana tried to smile at him but she seemed too worn and cold. I moved over to Arrie.

  “Have you got that safety razor?” I said. She nodded and fished around in her large bag with numb hands. She held it out to me. I removed the blade, went back to Killingsworth, and sliced through the ropes that bound his arms and feet. He massaged his hands and then said, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand what all these people are doing here—what you’re doing here. Where’re those two men—those two that kidnapped me? They did kidnap me, didn’t they? This hasn’t been somebody’s idea of a wretched joke?”

  “No joke,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it after I get warmed up.”

  Killingsworth rose and said in a stern voice, “I think you’d better tell me about it now, St. Ives.”

  “Fuck off, Killingsworth,” I said, “I’ll tell you about it when I’m goddamned good and ready.”

  I turned my back on him and walked over to the fire. They were all crowded around it, their hands and feet extended to the blaze. Arrie and Cordana had their shoes off. I looked around for something and finally found a large iron pot. I picked it up and walked across the room, down the stairs, and through the door that led outside. I dipped up a large pot of snow and took it back upstairs.

  “Here,” I said to the two women, “rub your feet with this. You could have frostbite.”

  “Well, by God, if any man alive could get us through it,” Wisdom said, “I knew St. Ives could.”

  “What’s your name, young man?” Killingsworth said, putting his hand on Wisdom’s shoulder.

  Wisdom popped to attention in his bare feet. “Wisdom, sir. I’m one of the St. Ives Irregulars. He brought us through hell, sir.”

  “Jesus,” I said and tugged off my soaked shoes.

  “At the pass, Mr. Ambassador,” Knight said in a rich voice full of respect and wonder. “Well, back at the pass I thought for a moment that we were all done for. If it hadn’t been for Colonel St. Ives, sir, well you could have written finis to this expedition.”

  “What are they talking about?” Tavro asked me in a hoarse whisper.

  “The
y’re full of frozen shit,” I said. “Some of it’s just beginning to thaw.”

  “What’re you doing here, Tavro?” Killingsworth said, his big voice booming the question out.

  Tavro looked at me and I took a handful of snow and rubbed it on my bare feet. “He’s with me, Killingsworth,” I said. I looked up at him. He hadn’t changed much in thirteen years. His hair was gray now and he wore it the way he always had, so that a thick lock of it fell down across his forehead. He was still handsome except for his blue eyes that were just a little pale and maybe just a little stupid, but then I was prejudiced. It was a big, wide face with a lot of chin and right now the big face looked puzzled and uncertain and I decided it was time to set him straight.

  “Near Sarajevo,” he said. “They forced my car off the road. It was a new car.”

  “Then what?”

  “They brought me here and made me chop wood. There were two of them, an Italian and another one, a Croat, I think. They threatened to kill me.”

  “Didn’t they tell you anything?”

  “They told me I was being held for ransom, but they wouldn’t tell me how much or how long I’d have to wait. They didn’t tell me anything. I kept asking about my car, but they wouldn’t even tell me about that.”

  “Your car’s okay,” I said. “The ransom was a million dollars. The government paid it. The kidnappers also demanded the release of Anton Pernik from house arrest and his safe conduct to the border. Gordana was to have gone with Pernik but he died. Tavro took his place. The kidnappers didn’t seem to care who came along. Anyway, I was tapped by the State Department to act as go-between in the deal. Mr. Wisdom and Mr. Knight came along to help out. You know Miss Tonzi here. She works for the CIA. I’m not sure why she’s along.”

  “You don’t make any sense, St. Ives,” Killingsworth said.

  “You’re not tied to a chair anymore, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Be grateful.” I turned back to the fireplace. “Anybody bring any booze?” I said.

  “It just so happens that I have a pint of fair bourbon,” Wisdom said, handing it over to me.