Stolen Away

I shrugged. “Like you said, maybe all that naval activity frightened ’em off. Maybe they disguised the Nelly, stuck her in some secluded cove somewhere.”

“It’s possible,” he agreed, a little too eagerly. “I’ll call Newark airport when I get home-arrange for a monoplane.”

“Good.”

We rode in silence; the woods were on our either side.

Then he said, “Could you join me on the search, tomorrow? It would be just the two of us.”

“Well…okay. But no practical jokes, okay?”

He managed a smile. “Okay.”

He turned off Amwell Road onto the dirt of Featherbed Lane. Soon the big house came into view; though it was nearing midnight, a scattering of lights were on. People were up.

“Oh God,” he said. “This is going to be hard. Look at that.”

“What?”

“The nursery.”

The lights were on in that second-floor corner room, glowing like a beacon. A mother was waiting to welcome her baby.

22

For the mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, this was a small drawing room-almost intimate, its several couches grouped around another of the omnipresent gold-veined marble fireplaces, in which a fire was lazily crackling. The room had a sunken effect, an open stairway along one wall leading up to a balcony that looked down on us from four sides.

Evalyn was draped against one end of one couch, as if posing for a portrait in the classical style, only she was wearing the simple brown-and-yellow plaid bathrobe she’d worn the first time I saw her. The Hope diamond was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Mike the dog was wearing it; he was nowhere to be seen, either. In the shadows of the reflecting fire, her face was lovely, but she looked tired, and sad-or anyway melancholy, which is the wealthy’s way of feeling sad.

I was sitting nearby, enjoying her company, morose though it might at the moment be. Despite her eccentricities, I liked this woman. She was a good person with a good heart, and she smelled good, too. She had large, firm breasts and was very, very rich. What wasn’t to like?

But her melancholia was catching. I had the nagging sense that all of us-from Lindbergh to Breckinridge to Schwarzkopf to Condon to Agents Irey and Wilson to Commodore Curtis to Evalyn Walsh McLean to Chicago P.D. liaison Nathan Heller-were on a fool’s errand. I simply could not feel that child’s presence out there. After a month and a week, the idea of getting that kid back safely seemed about as likely as Charles Augustus Lindbergh listening to reason.

I had gone up in the sky with Lindbergh again, at daybreak Monday, on the heels of the unfruitful Sikorsky search Sunday; smoothly guiding a Lockheed-Vega monoplane, the Lone Eagle combed the coastal waters of the Atlantic, and the Lone Passenger-me-helped him look. I was no longer bothered by flying-or maybe it was that Slim was taking it so much easier, not swooping down so suddenly, or skimming the sea’s skin so recklessly. He brought with him another blanket and a small suitcase of Charlie’s clothes; no milk this time. We flew over the Elizabeth Islands and Martha’s Vineyard, Coast Guard cutters still patrolling the Sound, the surface of which was as dark blue that day as Evalyn’s famous bauble.

No craft resembling the Nelly turned up, and by noon Lindy’s face had taken on a stony despondence. He didn’t say so, but I knew he was thinking of Commodore Curtis and the Norfolk contingent when, as afternoon blurred into evening, he swung as far south as Virginia.

The night before, Slim had come home to Hopewell empty-handed to comfort his waiting wife in the doorway; this night, the house again blazing with light, the nursery once more waiting for its tiny charge, Lindbergh met Anne in the doorway and fell into her arms. The tiny woman was patting the tall man’s stooped back like a child when I slipped silently away, feeling an intruder, finding the flivver I’d been given to use and heading to my suite at the Old Princeton Inn, knowing that this was over, but also knowing no one was quite ready, or able, to admit it. Certainly not Slim Lindbergh.

In the days that followed, Lindbergh allowed Condon to place another ad (“What is wrong? Have you crossed me? Please, better directions-Jafsie”) that brought no response. I spent several evenings at Condon’s, with Breckinridge, waiting for nothing. The professor’s spirits were low.

Condon had made a positive contribution, it seemed, by leading a federal agent to a shoe impression in the dirt of a freshly covered grave at St. Raymond’s, where “John” had jumped a fence along the cemetery’s access road. A moulage impression was made, waiting for eventual comparison to any captured suspects.

As the week wore on, Elmer Irey asked, and got, Lindbergh’s permission to distribute to banks a fifty-seven- page booklet listing the serial numbers of the 4,750 bills Jafsie had paid John. This seemed to me relatively pointless: bank tellers aren’t in the habit of noting the serial numbers of the bills they handle, and the booklet made no mention of the Lindbergh kidnapping.

A few days later, however, a bank teller in Newark figured out the booklet’s purpose, proposed his theory to a reporter and it was soon all over the wire services. Now that the list of numbers was labeled “Lindbergh” and published in the papers, shopkeepers started posting it near their cash registers. The first bill spotted, a twenty, turned up at a pastry shop in Greenwich, Connecticut.

“Now we’ve had it,” Lindbergh had said glumly, the day the wire services ID’ed the serial numbers list. “The kidnappers will never resume negotiations.”

“Slim,” I said. “They got their dough. Days ago, There aren’t going to be any more negotiations.” We were sitting in the kitchen of the house, both of us covered with soot and smelling of smoke. My morning as a detective had been spent helping Lindbergh, a dozen or so troopers, and butler Ollie Whately beat out a brushfire. We were alone-the smoke had sent the women of the house retreating to the Morrow house in Englewood. I was drinking a cold-sweating bottle of bootleg beer. Slim was drinking ice water.

“Besides,” I continued, “these may not even be the kidnappers-this could be an extortion scheme, plain and simple.”

“You saw the sleeping suit yourself, Nate….”

“Right! You got sent a standard-issue pair of kid’s pajamas to prove Charlie’s identity. Why not a photo? Or a lock of hair? Or something with your boy’s fingerprints on it?”

“We’ve been through that,” he said softly, unsurely.

I sighed heavily, sat forward; the backs of my hands were black. “Do you remember why I’m here? The name Al Capone ring a bell? You wouldn’t play Capone’s game, remember? And now he’s sitting back in Cook County Jail, waiting for his last appeal to be turned down.”

Face smudged with soot, Lindbergh gave me a testy look. “What’s your point?”

I spread my white-palmed black hands like Jolson singing “Mammy.” “If Capone took your boy, using his East-Coast bootleg gang connections to do so, he had to figure out long ago that he fucked up.”

His eyes were slits. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, if the initial idea was, ‘Snatch Lindy’s kid and deal myself outa stir,’ Capone knew weeks ago he failed. So none of these so-called kidnap gangs-not Jafsie’s, or the Commodore’s, or goddamn Gaston Means’s-may have your kid. All Jafsie’s ‘kidnappers’ most likely have is somebody on the inside-some servant who’s feeding them information, a sleeping suit, a copy of the first note that Capone’s kidnappers left behind…which gave ’em something to pattern the later notes on, and which got ’em fifty grand from you. And now Jafsie’s ‘kidnappers’ are as gone as your dough.”

“I don’t believe any of that.”

I shrugged. “It’s just a theory. But it’s as good as any.”

“If you’re right, Charlie is…” He couldn’t say it.

I patted the air, gently. “He could be. He could be. On the other hand, suppose Capone had Charlie snatched,