Stolen Away

Condon claimed he had scolded the man, telling him not to behave so rudely: “You are my guest!”

Following that berserk lesson in ransom etiquette, they sat in silence, which the “guest” broke. “It’s too dangerous. It would mean thirty years. Or I could burn. And I am only go-between.”

Condon hadn’t liked the sound of that. “What did you mean, you could ‘burn’?”

“I would burn if the baby is dead.”

“Dead! What are we doing here, if the child is dead!”

“The baby is not dead,” the man had said with reassuring matter-of-factness. “Would I burn if the baby is not dead?”

“I’m a teacher, sir, not a lawyer. Is the child well?”

“The baby is better than it was. We give more for him to eat than we heard in the paper from Mrs. Lindbergh. Tell her not to worry. Tell the Colonel not to worry, either. Baby is all right.”

“How do I know I am talking to the right man?”

“You got it, the letter with my singnature. Same singnature that was on my note in the crib.”

Here I interrupted Condon again to say: “But it wasn’t in the crib—it was on the windowsill.”

Condon gestured dismissively. “That small discrepancy is negligible, compared to the confirmation I did receive.”

Seated on the bench with his “guest,” Condon had removed from his pocket a small canvas pouch, opened it and extracted the safety pins he’d taken from the Lindbergh nursery.

“What are these?” Condon asked.

“Pins from the baby’s crib.”

I shook my head hearing this, as Condon said to me, “And thus I proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was indeed talking to the man who stood in the nursery and lifted that child from his crib!”

“Professor,” I said, “it doesn’t take a genius to identify safety pins as coming from a baby’s crib.”

“But these were identified as being from the Lindbergh baby’s crib!”

“Yeah, right. He might’ve guessed Baby Snooks, instead. Go on, go on.”

Condon had asked the man his name.

“John,” he’d said.

“My name is John, too. Where are you from, John?”

“Up farther than Boston.”

“What do you do, John?”

“I’m a sailor.”

“Bist du Deutsche?”

Condon’s question got only a puzzled look in return; the professor asked again, in English.

“Are you German?”

“No,” John said. “I’m Scandinavian.”

Condon then took time to explain to John that his (that is, John’s) mother, if she were still alive, would no doubt disapprove of these sordid activities. Then, because it was cold, Condon wasted even more time trying to convince his “guest”—who had a bad cough—to take his (that is, Condon’s) topcoat.

The baby, John told the professor, was on a boat (“boad,” he pronounced it). The boat was six hours away and could be identified by two white cloths on its masts. The ransom had been upped to seventy thousand because Lindbergh had disobeyed instructions and brought in the cops; besides, the kidnappers needed to put money aside in case they needed lawyers. The kidnap gang numbered six, two of whom were “womens.” John’s boss was “Number One,” a “smart man” who worked for the government. Number One would receive twenty grand of the seventy sought, and John and the other two men and the two nurses would each receive ten grand.

“It seems to me that you are doing the most dangerous job,” Condon said, sympathetically.

“I know it.”

“You’re getting a mere ten thousand dollars. I don’t think you’re getting your fair share.”

“I know it.”

“Look, John—leave them. Come with me to my house. I will get you one thousand dollars from my savings and see if I can get you more money from Colonel Lindbergh. That way, you’ll be on the law’s side.”

John shook his head and said, “No—I can’t do that. The boss would smack me out. They’d drill me.”

“You’ll be caught, John! Think of your mother!”

“We won’t be caught. We plan too careful—we prepared a year for this.”

Condon then offered to exchange himself as a hostage for the child; and when John turned him down, Condon asked to at least be taken to the baby. Surely John didn’t expect that the Lindbergh forces would pay the money without first seeing the child.

“No!” John said. “Number One would drill us both, if I took you there. But I will send by ten o’clock Monday morning proof we have the boy.”

“Proof?”

“His sleeping suit.”

Then, Condon claimed, John spent several minutes assuring the doctor, who brought up the subject, that Red Johnson and Betty Gow were not involved in the kidnapping; that they were innocent.

“This,” Condon said to me, “should be a relief to the Lindberghs and the police as well.”

I didn’t respond. My thoughts didn’t exactly mirror the old goat’s: I found it suspicious as hell that Condon would ask John about Johnson and Gow, and ridiculous that a kidnapper would ‘heatedly’ stick up for these strangers…unless of course they weren’t strangers to him.

John, rising to go, had asked a final question. “You will put another ad in the Bronx Home News?”

“I will,” Condon said.

“Say ‘Money is ready,’” John said, walking backward, lifting a finger. “And this time, it better be.”

And he turned and slipped into darkness.