Stolen Away

Breckinridge touched a napkin to his lips and pushed his plate of mostly uneaten food away.

“As a result,” Condon said, “I’m convinced our kidnappers are of Italian origin. My Sicilian friend confirmed my suspicion, explaining that the symbol was that of a secret criminal organization in the old country-the symbol is the trilgamba, or ‘three legs.’”

“Three legs?” Breckinridge asked.

“My Sicilian friend explained that two legs were fine, but ‘when a third leg walks, beware.’”

“Let me write that down,” I said.

“Its symbolic meaning,” Condon continued, “is that if a third leg, a stranger, enters into the province of the secret society, the Mafia, that intruder can expect a stiletto through the heart.”

His daughter Myra, cutting her meat, dropped her own knife clatteringly. “Daddy,” she said. “Please don’t do this. Please withdraw from this silly dangerous escapade.”

Colonel Breckinridge looked at the young woman with mournful eyes. “Please don’t ask that, miss. Your father may be the only honest person on earth actually in contact with the kidnappers.”

“Excuse me,” Myra said stiffly, “I think I’ll pass on dessert,” and hurled her napkin to the table and got up and went out through the front parlor; her footsteps on the hall stairs, several rooms away, conveyed her annoyance.

After apple pie, Breckinridge stepped out onto the porch for a smoke-the professor allowed no tobacco of any kind in his “domicile”-leaving Mr. and Mrs. Condon to keep watch by Mr. Bell’s invention, which was on a stand in the hallway outside the living room.

“Can you believe that man?” Breckinridge said bitterly, puffing greedily on a cigarette. “Showing that signature around the Bronx! To some ‘Sicilian friend’!”

“He’s a dunce, all right,” I said. “Unless he’s very clever.”

“Clever?”

I nodded, tapped my temple with one finger. “Something clicked in this hat rack I call a head, while he was babbling about that Mafia sign. When I first talked to him on the phone, back at Hopewell, Condon told me that the letter to him was signed with ‘the mark of the Mafia.’”

“Yes. I remember. So?”

“He went to great lengths to assure me that he hadn’t opened the interior envelope, the one addressed to Slim.”

“Right.”

“I even heard him rip it open, over the phone.”

“Yes. I recall.”

“Well, the note to Slim was signed with the ‘mark of the Mafia,’ all right-but the note to Condon was unsigned.”

Breckinridge thought about that. “But how could the professor know about the signature before he opened the letter…?”

“Exactly. Of course, he may have already opened that inner letter, and just ripped some other piece of paper for the benefit of my ears. But either way…”

“Yes. Worth noting, Heller. Worth noting. And there’s something I might tell you.”

“Well, hell, go ahead.”

Breckinridge drew on the cigarette, exhaled a wreath of smoke. “Last night Condon was, as usual, running off at the mouth. He was talking about his daughter, Myra, how she’d been a teacher before her marriage. And then he got into a spiel about how ‘the love of teaching runs strongly’ in his family. That Mrs. Condon had been a ‘splendid schoolteacher herself,’ that he and she had first met when they were teaching at the same public school.”

“Yeah. So what?”

“Heller, they taught at Old Public School Number Thirty-Eight, in Harlem.”

That hit me like a sack of nickels. “Harlem! As in Sarah Sivella and Martin Marinelli, Harlem?”

“Exactly.” He pitched his cigarette into a small bank of snow on the lawn. “Shall we go in?”

But before we could, an eager Mrs. Condon appeared in the doorway and said, “The phone is ringing, gentlemen…my husband is about to answer it.”

We moved quickly through the house and saw Condon pick up the phone in the midst of a ring.

“Who is it, please?” he said formally; he stood with chin high, light-blue eyes about as alert as a Chinese opium addict’s.

After a beat, he said, “Yes, I got your letter.”

I stood close to him and bent the receiver away from his ear, so that I could hear, too. Condon gave me a reproving look but didn’t fight me.

“I saw your ad,” a crisp, clear voice said, “in the New York American.’”

“Yes? Where are you calling from?”

Brilliant question! Fucking brilliant!

“Westchester,” the voice said.

Condon’s brow knit as he tried to think of something else incisive to ask.

“Dr. Condon, do you write sometimes pieces for the papers?”

That seemed to take the professor aback. After a moment, he said, “Why yes-I sometimes write articles for the papers.”

A pause was followed by the voice speaking in a dim, muffled tone to someone standing by: “He says sometimes he writes pieces for the papers.”

The voice returned, strong and clear and a bit guttural. “Stay in every night this week. Stay at home from six to twelve. You will receive a note with instructions. Act accordingly or all will be off.”

“I shall stay in,” Condon said, putting his hand on his heart.

“Statti citto!”

Another voice on the phone had said the latter, cutting in.

Almost half a silent minute crawled by. Then the crisp, guttural voice said, “All right. You will hear from us.”

Condon blinked at the click of the phone, then said, self-importantly, and pointlessly, “They have severed the connection.”

He severed his own connection-that is, he hung up-and I said to Breckinridge, “Could you hear all that?”

“Yes,” Breckinridge said. “What was that foreign phrase?”

“Statti citto,” I said. “It means, ‘shut up,’ in Sicilian. My guess is they were using a public phone, and someone was walking by.”

“I think,” Condon said, thinking deeply, “he may have been deceiving us when he said he was calling from Westchester.”

“No, really?” I said archly. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“We’ll have to get the money together quickly,” Breckinridge said, distractedly, pacing in the small area.

“The kidnappers’ last letter was quite specific as to the dimensions of the money box,” Condon said. “Might I offer to have such a box built, tomorrow?”

Breckinridge looked at me and I shrugged.

Condon went on, raising a lecturing forefinger. “Upstairs, in my study, I have the ballot box of the Lieutenant-Governor of the State of New York in eighteen hundred and twenty.”

Whoop-de-doo.

“It has a lid, two hinges and a casement lock. The box I shall have constructed will duplicate that ancient ballot box.”

“What’s the point?” I asked.

Condon’s apple cheeks were a pair of pink balls in his ludicrous smiling face. “I’ll specify that it is to be of five-ply veneer. We’ll use different types of wood in its construction. Maple, pine, tulipwood…and a couple of other varieties. Five different in all.”

“Which will make the box easy to identify,” I said.

Breckinridge looked at me, curiously.

“It’s not a bad idea,” I said, surprising us all.

“Doctor,” Breckinridge said, putting a hand on the old boy’s shoulder. “I’m not unaware of the sacrifice you’re