I see. Then that was long before the FBI arrived on the scene.
I’m afraid I wouldn’t know that, Mr. Skinner.
Sorry. Talking to myself. Can you tell me what action you took?
Well, after I came down off the ceiling I called in my two chief assistants and we had a council of war. I told them what Paul Maitland had told me. There was a bughouse character threatening to spray bombs all over Manhattan if we didn’t come up with five million in unmarked bills, nothing larger than hundred-dollar denominations. I asked my assistants if they had any bright ideas. That’s what assistants are for. One of them had the only bright idea any of us came up with during the day.
What was that?
Get out of town.
(Laughter) I can quite understand that. But you did make concrete efforts toward raising the cash, didn’t you?
Well, sure we did. But we had to start from a depressing premise. There isn’t that much cash. I mean there simply isn’t. Oh, you could go out and canvass every biped in the five boroughs of New York and you might find an average of ten bucks a person. But you don’t find that kind of cash lying around in one institutional bundle. The biggest bank in the city might have a few hundred thousand in cash on hand at any one moment. But the only place where you’d find anything in the millions would be the Federal Reserve or maybe the safe-deposit boxes of a few Mafia dons.
What did you decide to do?
Hell, we did the only thing we could do. We got permission from Paul Maitland and we phoned the boys over at the Federal Reserve.
Grofeld
Your name, please, Captain?
Henry L. Grofeld. L. for Listowel, if it matters. Captain, NYPD. Chief of the First Division.
I gather that’s a statement you’ve prepared for us?
That’s right.
Would you like to read it into the record?
Is that necessary?
We could simply have the stenographer insert it, if you prefer.
That would save time, wouldn’t it? Why don’t you do it that way, then? Here you go.
Thank you…
(Pause)
Good Lord. This isn’t exactly what I expected.
I guess it’s not the usual officialese.
Did you prepare this for publication, Captain?
Sort of. But under the circumstances I don’t suppose I can ever submit it.
It’s a shame. This looks like a nice piece of work.
Well, I’ve got a confession to make. I moonlight as a writer-detective stories, crime novels. Under a pen name, of course. I’ve written several books.
Just leafing through this, it looks like a remarkable job of reconstructing the background of this case-the histories of the two men. How did you find the time?
I asked for it. It wasn’t just that I’d participated in the case. The whole thing fit into all my interests, as it happened. Criminal psychology, aircraft, and of course writing. I was given departmental leave to research the profiles on Ryterband and Craycroft. The leave was granted because the department was interested in the case the same way you’re interested in it-the idea that possibly we could determine what had caused the thing, and maybe if we knew that, we might be closer to preventing it happening again. Anyhow, I was put on detached duty with the assignment of compiling dossiers on the two men and the background of the case from its beginnings. Eventually, as you see, that took me back nearly forty years.
(Reading) “The bombs were five-hundred-pounders. Armed, contact-fused, balanced with machine-shop precision. They squatted in the abdomen of the thirty-year-old Flying Fortress like a deadly brood embryo.
“They hung in racks above open bomb-bay doors, poised to drop. Beneath them was the unsuspecting target: Manhattan, the city of New York-innocent hostage to one man’s demented dreams.
“Harold Craycroft had prepared a squadron of Eighth Air Force bombers for their participation in the deadly bombardment of the city of Dresden in the Second World War. Now he had prepared his own bomber-an airplane which actually had flown in the Dresden raid-for a macabre encore against the most concentrated urban center in the United States.
“The anatomy of the Craycroft-Ryterband case is unique in American criminological history. There can be no question that Craycroft was deranged, but his derangement led to a crime that was stunningly brilliant in the simplicity of its plan, awesome in concept, terrifying in implication. Drawn up and executed in its entirety by one solitary man (with incidental assistance from his brother-in-law), the Craycroft ransom may well turn out to have been literally the crime of the century.”
That’s an impressive opening, Captain. Here-I return this to you temporarily so that you can refer to it. I wonder if you’d mind covering the essentials of your paper orally, for our tape recorder. You may use the paper for reference as you talk, of course, and read from it if you wish. We’ll enter the entire document into the record, of course, but I’d rather go over it with you orally because various questions are bound to occur to me that may not be covered by the document itself. Do you mind?
No. However you want to do it.
Well, just start at the beginning then, if you will.
Right. I began with a biographical resume on Harold Craycroft. You want me to go over that?
Please.
Craycroft was born in Cincinnati on January twenty-third, nineteen eighteen. His father was an American aviator, in the Army, fighting in France. The father was killed when Craycroft was barely three months old.
(Reading) “Craycroft grew up in the shadow of his father’s legend. His mother (who gave piano lessons to augment the meager pension) and his two older sisters seem to have lived their lives as supplicants at the altar of Jeremy Craycroft’s memory; their Bible was the scrapbook of the elder Craycroft’s heroics.
“By the middle nineteen thirties, encouraged by the pressures of mother and sisters, Craycroft had apprenticed himself to a series of itinerant aviators of the breed that drifted incessantly across the Midwest during the Depression: the barnstorming county-fair pilots who walked the wings of their fabric-and-wood biplanes, slept in open cornfields under the wings of their rickety Spads and Jennies. At the age of seventeen Craycroft had already developed a reputation in the Ohio-Indiana area as one of the most exciting daredevil pilots on the fairground circuit.
“In nineteen thirty-six his mother fell ill with a lingering ailment, which probably was Parkinson’s disease. To support the family-only one sister had married-Craycroft was forced to seek gainful employment…”
He was eighteen then? What about education?
He’d left high school at fourteen. Of course it was the nadir of the Depression then. But he found a pretty good job right away, as a flight-line mechanic on the Trimotor assembly line at the Ford plant in Dearborn.
Sorry. Go on.
(Reading) “He was even then, according to testimony provided by retired Ford employees, a genius with aircraft engines.
“In nineteen thirty-eight he joined forces with Charles Ryterband, an aircraft designer and fellow Dearborn mechanic, to form the short-lived Cray-band Motors, Incorporated, an independent and privately owned company organized for the purpose of designing and building specialized airplane engines for racing planes, polar exploration aircraft and other custom uses. The company foundered within ten months.
“Evidently in search of adventure, Craycroft left the Midwest shortly after the death of his mother in December, nineteen thirty-eight. In July, nineteen thirty-nine, his name is found on the roster of the Balchen
