Stolen Away

wind.

They spoke for perhaps two minutes, and then Condon abruptly backed away.

“No!” I heard him say.

I reached for my gun.

Then I saw a figure, a man in a dark topcoat and hat, climb up, over and down the gate and land almost at Condon’s feet. For a split second the two men faced each other, the one who’d jumped remaining in a catlike crouch.

“It’s too dangerous!” the man said, and began to run.

The guy, who was about a head shorter than Condon, ran across the street, diagonally-right in front of me, though I got no sort of look at him at all, his dark felt hat brim pulled down, obscuring his face.

A cemetery security guard had appeared at the gate-his presence, apparently, had spooked the man in the dark topcoat-and was shouting, “Hey! What’s going on?”

But Condon was ignoring that. The old boy was hoofing it across the street after the man. I had them both in sight. And I could have joined in the chase. But the professor was doing all right, at the moment. I stayed a spectator-for now.

The man ran north into the park; Condon followed, calling out to him: “Hey! Come back here! Don’t be a coward!”

The guy slowed, and turned, and waited for Condon. They were only a few hundred feet into the park. The cemetery security guard hadn’t even bothered to come out; he’d stayed inside to protect the dead. Condon and his companion were standing by a clump of trees near a small groundskeeper’s hut with a park bench in front of it.

Condon gestured to the bench and the guy thought about it, and sat. And then so did Condon.

They sat and they talked. For a long, long time.

I thought about getting out of the car and finding my way to those trees and bushes and eavesdropping. But the guy’s compatriots might be watching me, and I might queer the whole deal. And I could see both Condon and the man in the dark topcoat just fine. I could be there in seconds if trouble developed.

But it didn’t. They just sat and talked.

While I sat stewing, my gun in my lap, looking around for signs of anybody else, kidnappers, T-men, innocent bystanders, anybody. Tonight the Bronx was as dead as Woodlawn Cemetery.

Finally, after an eternity, they stood.

And shook hands.

The man in the dark topcoat turned away and walked north, disappearing into the wooded park. Condon watched him go, then walked slowly toward my car. He was smiling.

“That went well, I think,” he said, getting in.

“I’d have opened the car door for you,” I said, “but my hands are numb from the cold. You talked to that guy for over an hour.”

“There’s no longer any possibility of doubt,” he said. “We’re in touch with the right ones. Those who have the baby. It’s only a question of time, now.”

“And money. You’ll never know how close I came to following you. I should have grabbed that son of a bitch.”

“What good would that do? You’d spoil everything!”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m starting to think these bastards are playing us for suckers. That kid could be dead, you know.”

Condon blanched, but recovered, a silly grin peeking out under the walrus mustache. “No, no. Everything’s fine. The child’s being fed according to the diet.”

As we drove back to his home, an animated Condon told me about his meeting with the man, who gave his name as “John.” And then he told it to Breckinridge, and the next day to Lindbergh. I heard it three times, and each 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!”