The Frumious Bandersnatch

these small, high-speed boats that can carry up to two thousand keys of cocaine. But they can’t outrun our DPBs. Means we can intercept and board and make a sizable dent in the traffic.”

Carella hated boats. He hated anything that moved on water. Especially DPBs, which seemed to move faster than any damn thing he’d ever seen on water. When he used to bathe his infant twins—lo, those many years ago—even the floating rubber duck in the bathtub made him seasick. Well, perhaps that was an exaggeration. But hewas feeling a bit queasy now, and he was also fearful that all that dark greasy water splashing over the bow might be polluted. His face wet, his hair flying in the wind, he wondered what a nice boy like himself was doing on a swiftly moving vehicle in the middle of a deep river on a shift that had just barely begun.

Tonight, Carella felt—and therefore looked—more like a beloved professor of economics at a municipal college than a detective. Hatless, dark-haired and brown-eyed, the eyes slanting downward to give his face a somewhat Oriental appearance, he was wearing an orange-colored life vest over dark brown slacks and matching loafers and socks, a blue button-down shirt, a brown tie, and a tweed jacket that was, in truth, a bit too heavy for the mild weather and a bit too shabby for the sort of party that had been interrupted out there on theRiver Princess. He was frowning. Well, he was more than frowning. In fact, he looked as if he might throw up. Unamused, he stood on the deck of a tossing peanut-shell vessel, braving the raging briny while two old sea-faring types chatted it up and grinned into the wind.

Hawes, on the other hand, was in his element.

Dressed somewhat casually, even for the midnight-to-eightA.M. shift, he was wearing his life jacket over blue jeans, a crew neck green sweater, a zippered brown leather jacket, and ankle high brown boots. He had not expected to be pulled out onto the River Harb tonight—in fact, he’d been planning to do a field follow-up on some bikers he suspected were involved in a liquor store holdup, and he figured the protective coloration might help him. Actually, though, his costume would have fit in beautifully at Tamar Valparaiso’s launch party, where many of the music industry’s moguls were similarly dressed.

“Ever hear of this girl before?” Apted asked him.

He had given up on Carella as a lost-cause landlubber.

“What’s her name?” Hawes asked.

“Tamar Valentino,” Apted said.

“No. Is she famous or something?”

“Not to me,” Apted said.

“Me, neither,” Hawes said. “Steve!” he yelled over the roar of the wind. “You ever hear of a singer named Tamar Valentino?”

“No!” Carella yelled back. “Who is she?”

“The one who got snatched,” Apted said.

“If she got snatched, she must be somebody,” Hawes said reasonably.

Carella was wondering if the FBI had already been notified.

“I HAVE TOtell you the truth,” Sergeant McIntosh said, “I been with the Harbor Patrol Unit for twenty-two years now, this is the first time I ever caught a kidnapping.”

“We don’t catch many of them onshore, either,” Hawes said.

“I know, anything we catch—other than immediately address-able—we’re supposed to notify the onshore locals. But ain’t a kidnapping federal stuff?”

“It could become,” Carella said.

“I mean, wouldn’t this be considered ‘Special Maritime and Territorial’ jurisdiction?”

“I really don’t know,” Carella said.

“I know the Great Lakes are covered,” McIntosh said, “and the St. Lawrence River, and prob’ly the Mississippi and the Hudson…”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Anyway, what I did was raise the Coast Guard, who I figured would know.”

“Did they?”

“No.”

“The way I figure it,” Carella said, “there’s a state line down the middle of the river, and if the boat crossed that, then the Feds come in automatically.”

“Sometimes they come in if the case is really high profile,” Hawes said. “Like if this rock singer is somebody really important.”

“Who is she, anyway?” McIntosh asked.

“Somebody named Tamar Valentino,” Hawes said.

“Never heard of her.”

“Me, neither.”

“So scratch the FBI.”

“Unless the boat crossed that state line,” Carella said.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” a man in a white uniform said, breaking into the little intimate law enforcement circle. “I’m Charles Reeves, Captain of theRiver Princess. I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got a hundred and twelve guests aboard this vessel and we’ve been sitting here dead in the water ever since the incident occurred, waiting for some sort of clear indication that we can begin moving her back to port. Is there anyone here who can…?”

“You can move her,” Carella said.

“You are, sir?”

“Detective Stephen Louis Carella. Eighty-seventh Squad.”

“And you are authorized to…?”

“It’s our case, yes,” Carella said, and thought, So far. “This is my partner. Detective Cotton Hawes.”

“Then I’ll get the engines started,” Reeves said dubiously.

“Yes, that’ll be fine,” Hawes said.

“We should be docking in about half an hour,” Reeves said. “Will you be finished here by then?”

“Finished?”

“What I’m asking is will I be able to disembark the passengers? The yacht was only leased for the night, you know, not the entire month of May.”

Carella looked at him.

“I mean, we all have jobs to do,” Reeves said. “I’ve never had anything like this happen before on any vessel I’ve commanded. Never.”

“It’ll be all right, sir,” Carella said. “Why don’t you go get your engines started?”

Reeves hesitated a moment longer, as if there were something more he wished to say. Then he merely nodded and went off toward the pilot house.

“You don’t plan to talk to all hundred andtwelve of these people, do you?” McIntosh asked.

Carella was wondering the same thing.

EVERYBODYwanted to go home.

What had started out as a nice party on a nice boat on a nice river had turned into some kind of Fellini nightmare with people in masks running around doing violence to the same pretty young girl.

Nobody seemed to agree on exactly quite what had happened.

Given that eye witnesses were notoriously unreliable, this bunch seemed to be more untrustworthy than most. Perhaps they’d been plied with too much alcohol before the occurrence (though the promised champagne toast had to be forsaken, given the unforeseen circumstances) or perhaps the lighting had been too dim or the power of suggestion too strong. Tamar and the young black dancer had, after all, been engaged in some pretty realistic although terpsichorean violence, and all at once twoother black guys…

The witnesses were all convinced the kidnappers were black…

…came marching down the grand stairway there, brandishing machine guns, and yelling for nobody to fucking move.