Stolen Away

Tall, rawboned yet fleshy looking, dark hair thinning and slicked back, Whately was Colonel Lindbergh’s butler, not a chauffeur, and he seemed to resent the duty. I’d tried to make conversation, and got back a combination of stiff upper lip and cold shoulder, so I buttoned my lip, settled my shoulder against the door of the tan Franklin sedan, and began sawing logs.

I needed the sleep. I’d been up much of the night, moving from the smoking car to the dining car, drinking too heavily for my own good. The Chicago P.D. had predictably seen fit to buy me the cheapest accommodations possible—frankly, I counted myself lucky I wasn’t in the baggage compartment—and I had slept only fitfully, in my Pullman upper.

But it wasn’t the accommodations, really. It was me. I was nervous. I’d never been east before, and certainly never met anybody as famous as Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh—except maybe Al Capone, and we hadn’t really met, had we? Besides which, Lindbergh was one of the few men on this disreputable planet that a Chicago cynic like yours truly couldn’t help but admire.

Only a few years older than me, Lindbergh was, of course, one of the most famous and admired men in the world. Five short years ago he’d piloted his tiny, single-engine plane—the Spirit of St. Louis—across the Atlantic Ocean; this 3,610-mile jaunt—the first solo nonstop flight from New York to Paris—had made the gangling, unassuming youth (twenty-five years old at the time) an immediate international celebrity. Without meaning to, he won hundreds of awards and medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor. Judging by the papers and newsreels, he was a quiet, even shy midwestern boy who’d managed to give Americans a hero in an age of immorality and corruption.

I didn’t believe in heroes, yet Lindbergh was a hero to me, too. I felt strangely embarrassed about this, and oddly uncomfortable about going to meet him; and uneasy about encountering him at such a sad, desperate point in his life.

“Sour land,” Whately said, suddenly, in a bass voice that rattled the windows of the sedan, and shook me from half-awake to fully.

“What?”

Whately repeated himself, and it turned out to be one word, not two: “Sourland—sometimes known as the ‘lost land.’” The butler, dressed in funereal black, sitting back regally from the wheel, nodded his big head toward his window at the tangled thickness of woods through which the long black-mud private lane had been cut.

“They say,” he said, “that Hessian soldiers fell prey to the maze of these woods, and, giving up, settled here.” He looked at me ominously. “They mixed their blood with Indians’.”

He said this as if he were referring to a laboratory experiment, not some good-natured redskin nookie.

“Later, runaway slaves hid in the Sourland Mountains,” he added, darkly.

I made a clicking sound in my cheek. “I bet some more blood got mixed, too.”

Whately nodded, his expression grave. “The descendants of the Hessians and their interbred rabble live in tar-paper shacks and caves in these hills and mountains.”

“Funny neighborhood to stick a fancy house in,” I offered.

“The Colonel chose the location from the air,” Whately said, shifting gears on the sedan and the conversation. He sounded matter-of-fact, dismissing from consideration the wild bands of mixed-blood hillbillies he’d summoned up. He lifted one large hand off the wheel and painted in the air. “Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh chose the crest of a knoll, higher than fog could disrupt.”

“He has a landing strip, then?”

Whately nodded. “Even this dirt road itself discourages travelers and sightseers. The Colonel likes his privacy. A remote estate is a necessity for the Lindberghs.”

“And a liability.”

He turned his head slowly and looked at me down his long nose, which was quite a trip. “Pardon?”

“Stuck out in the middle of nowhere, they’re an easy target. For cutthroat mix-breed hillbillies, say—or a kidnapper.”

Whately snorted and turned his attention back to driving.

Autos and ambulances swarmed the roadsides by the whitewashed stone wall with wrought-iron gate. Some of the cars bore the cachet of a particular news service, while the ambulances were an old press trick: they’d been converted to mobile photo labs—retaining their sirens, of course, to ensure getting where they needed to as fast as possible. Standing out in the bitter March air, mixing cigar and cigarette smoke with that of their breaths, were hundreds of reporters and photographers and newsreel cameramen, gathered like flies at a dead animal. An abandoned ramshackle farmhouse, well outside the gate but in sight of it, was providing shelter for dozens of newshounds.

Several New Jersey troopers stood on guard at the gate. They looked as crisp as the Sourland weather, light-blue uniform jackets, leather-visored caps, yellow-striped riding britches.

“They look like chorus boys in The Student Prince,” I said.