at least their eyes were—but only Arafat was talking. Tamar figured he was the leader of the gang, the one who’d told her his eyes were brown. She could still see that his smiling eyes were brown. He was the same dude, all right.
“We have the money,” he told her. “Everything went off without a hitch.”
No wonder he was smiling.
The other two nodded in agreement. They were still smiling. George Bush had nice tits; Tamar wondered which one she was sleeping with.
“I’m telling you all this,” Arafat said, “because I want to warn you again not to do anything stupid.”
Do anything stupid! She was still handcuffed to the radiator!
“We’re going to count the money now. If it’s all here, we’ll drop you off someplace, and you’ll be home before you can spell your last name,” he said, and she wondered if that was an ethnic slur.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “Thank you,” she added.
For nothing, she thought.
“So be a good girl, honey,” Hussein said, smiling, and all three jackasses went out of the room.
She heard the lock clicking shut behind them.
OLLIE STOPPEDfor a snack after he was relieved at a quarter to five, and then walked crosstown to his piano teacher’s apartment, right here in the Eight-Eight. He had called her early Sunday morning to ask if she could get him the sheet music to Al Martino’s “Spanish Eyes”…
“Not the one the Backstreet Boys did,” he cautioned.
…and she had promised she would try. Now, at seven minutes to six on this Monday night, the fifth of May, Ollie climbed the steps to the fifth floor and rapped on the door to apartment 53. He was glad he couldn’t hear the sound of a piano inside. This meant her previous student had already left. Helen Hobson’s apartment was tiny, and if she was still giving a lesson when he arrived, he had to wait outside in the hall.
She was smiling when she opened the door for him. A woman in her late fifties, rail thin and wearing her habitual green cardigan sweater over a brown woolen skirt, she said, “Well, Detective Weeks, you’re right on time this evening.”
“Always a pleasure to come here,” Ollie said, which was the truth.
“Come in, come in,” Helen said, and stepped aside to let him by.
The grand piano always came as a surprise in this small apartment. Walking toward it behind his teacher, Ollie always felt as if he was being led onstage at Clarendon Hall. Sitting beside her on the piano bench, he always felt as if he was about to begin playing a duet with Arthur Rubenstein or Glenn Gould or one of those guys.
“Well, I got it,” Helen said, turning to him and beaming.
For a moment, Ollie was puzzled. Then he realized…
“ ‘Spanish
“Yes, indeed. I tried half a dozen different stores before I found it at Lenny’s Music, all the way downtown. I was about ready to give up, Mr. Weeks, I must tell you.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Ollie said.
“Oh, so am I. It’s a lovely song.”
“You played it?”
“The moment I came home. It’s truly lovely. And
“Well, like you say, it’s very romantic…”
“Oh yes.”
“And uh truly lovely,” he said.
“Indeed. So what shall we do first? Would you like to play what you’ve been practicing, or would you like to bust your chops on the new one, as they say?”
“Why don’t we just bust my chops?” Ollie said, grinning.
“Very well,” Helen said, and turned to the piano.
“Spanish Eyes” had a picture of Al Martino on its glossy front cover. With a flourish, Helen threw the cover back to reveal the actual sheet music.
Ollie was looking at a whole hell of a lot of notes.
“Gee,” he said, “I dunno.”
“Oh come now,” Helen said. “Is this the man who mastered ‘Night and Day’?”
“Yeah, but…”
“Put your hands on the keyboard, Mr. Weeks,” she suggested. “Please note that this is written in the key of…”
THEY LEFT THEmasks on because being Arafat and Hussein and Bush made them feel like big shots. Sitting at the kitchen table, the television set going in the other room, they kept reaching for banded bundles of money in the dispatch case, counting each bundle and writing down their separate tallies. Each bundle had twenty hundred-dollar bills in it. That came to $2,000 a bundle. Altogether, there were a hundred and twenty-five packets in that dispatch case. That didn’t seem like very much, but that’s what $250,000 in hundred-dollar bills looked like.
While they counted, they started talking about what they were going to do with all that money, even though it didn’t seem like all that much now that it was actually here in front of them.
Yasir Arafat said he was going to use his $83,333 dollars to hire 833 suicide bombers at a hundred bucks a pop to go blow up restaurants and school busses and dance halls and the like all over Israel. Avery thought he was merely speaking in character, but Kellie figured he was probably anti-Semitic.
Saddam Hussein picked up the cue and said he was going to use his share of the money to purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles to shoot at “your father,” he told Kellie, “get the job done right this time.”
George W. Bush said she would spend her share of the money on a pair of strappy Prada pumps.
“That’s not in character,” Avery told her.
“They’ll be in character if I wear them with an Armani dress,” she said.
“You’re supposed to be Bush,” he said.
“Whoever,” she said, and shrugged airily. All this money was making her a bit light-headed. Though, to tell the truth, it didn’t look like so very much, fitting in the dispatch case that way.
They kept counting it.
In the other room, the six o’clock news was coming on.
The lead story was about Tamar Valparaiso’s kidnapping. This immediately caught their complete attention. They got up from the kitchen table at once and en masse. Leaving all that money behind—though now that they were used to it, it didn’t seem like all that much, really—they went into the living room and plopped down on the sofa as if they’d just got home from school, three kids who bore unfortunate resemblances to Bush, Arafat, and Hussein. The real Bush, Arafat, and Hussein were probably watching CNN themselves at that very same moment, though probably not wearing masks. And they probably were not as interested in Tamar Valparaiso.
The anchorman was saying there were no clues as yet to the whereabouts of the kidnapped rock star.
When they heard the word “star,” all three world leaders turned to look at each other, each of them realizing that Tamar hadn’t been a star before they’d kidnapped her.
The anchor was saying that neither the police nor the FBI would ascertain whether or not a ransom demand had yet been made.
“Good,” Arafat said.
This was Avery Hanes, in case Kellie or Cal had forgotten.
The anchorman said, “Meanwhile, Billboard 200 reports that
“
“Shhhh,” Bush warned.
“…the number-one position, having sold 750,000 copies since its debut this past Friday. This places it higher on the charts than Avril Lavigne’s new album at number four, the Dixie Chicks at number six, and Xzibit in the number-eight slot.”
