Stolen Away

time it was a little different.

The man in the dark overcoat and dark soft felt hat had held the white handkerchief to his face as he spoke to the professor through the bars of the iron gate.

“Did you got it, the money?” the man had asked.

“No,” Condon said. “I can’t bring the money until I see the package.”

By “package” the professor meant the child, of course.

At this point the snap of a breaking twig had broken the gloom like a gunshot, startling both men.

“A cop!” the man said. “He’s with you!”

At this point the man had climbed the gate and, for a moment, sans handkerchief mask, faced Condon.

“You brought the cops!”

“No! I wouldn’t do that.”

“It’s too dangerous!”

I interrupted Condon’s story to ask him to describe the man.

“I only saw his face for a fleeting moment,” Condon said.

“Well, you sat and talked to him for an hour!”

“In the dark, with his hat pulled down and his coat collar up,” Condon pointed out. “But I would venture to say he was about five foot eight, aged thirty to thirty-five, weighing perhaps a hundred sixty pounds. Fair to chestnut hair.”

“You said he never took his hat off.”

“Yes, but that nonetheless is the coloration, judging by his sideburns, and the hair around his ears. He had almond-shaped eyes, like a Chinaman.”

“Any accent?”

“Yes. Pronounced his t’s as d’s, and his c’s as g’s.”

“German?”

“I would say Scandinavian.”

After their brief face-to-face confrontation, the man had run across the street (in front of me in the parked flivver) into the park, and Condon—after assuring the approaching security guard that there was nothing wrong— followed him there, both of them settling on the park bench near the hut.

Condon claimed he had scolded the man, telling him not to behave so rudely: “You are my guest!”

Following that berserk lesson in ransom etiquette, they sat in silence, which the “guest” broke. “It’s too dangerous. It would mean thirty years. Or I could burn. And I am only go-between.”

Condon hadn’t liked the sound of that. “What did you mean, you could ‘burn’?”

“I would burn if the baby is dead.”

“Dead! What are we doing here, if the child is dead!”

“The baby is not dead,” the man had said with reassuring matter-of-factness. “Would I burn if the baby is not dead?”

“I’m a teacher, sir, not a lawyer. Is the child well?”

“The baby is better than it was. We give more for him to eat than we heard in the paper from Mrs. Lindbergh. Tell her not to worry. Tell the Colonel not to worry, either. Baby is all right.”

“How do I know I am talking to the right man?”

“You got it, the letter with my singnature. Same singnature that was on my note in the crib.”

Here I interrupted Condon again to say: “But it wasn’t in the crib—it was on the windowsill.”

Condon gestured dismissively. “That small discrepancy is negligible, compared to the confirmation I did receive.”

Seated on the bench with his “guest,” Condon had removed from his pocket a small canvas pouch, opened it and extracted the safety pins he’d taken from the Lindbergh nursery.

“What are these?” Condon asked.

“Pins from the baby’s crib.”

I shook my head hearing this, as Condon said to me, “And thus I proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was indeed talking to the man who stood in the nursery and lifted that child from his crib!”

“Professor,” I said, “it doesn’t take a genius to identify safety pins as coming from a baby’s crib.”

“But these were identified as being from the Lindbergh baby’s crib!”

“Yeah, right. He might’ve guessed Baby Snooks, instead. Go on, go on.”

Condon had asked the man his name.

“John,” he’d said.