Stolen Away

He was looking absently out the side window, into darkness. He was still wearing the amber glasses and cap; he wore them all the way home. “I’m anxious to have this over.”

“Don’t get too anxious.”

He looked at me. “Do you trust Condon?”

“Not particularly.”

“Do you think he’s an accomplice?”

“Maybe. Or a dupe.”

“Or exactly what he seems to be?”

“Which is what, Slim?”

“A good-hearted old patriot who wants to help out…” And he trailed off.

“Who wants to help out the ‘Lone Eagle’? Maybe. A bigger question is, are these extortionists the people who have your son?”

“You don’t think they are?”

“They could be operating off inside information from servants, or from Mickey Rosner. They don’t know anything I don’t know, for example. And what the hell do you know about me?”

“I know I trust you.”

“Well, you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t trust any fucking body.”

“I trust my own instincts.”

“And your instincts tell you that ‘John’ is one of the kidnappers?”

He shook his head from side to side, but it was not in a “no” gesture. “I’m not closing off any avenue I can go down to find my son. And this sleeping suit…”

“This sleeping suit is standard, issue, Slim. Store-bought, lacking in laundry marks, or any other identification. There are thousands, tens of thousands, like it.”

“I gave the newspapers a false description of the garment, remember?”

“I remember. So the extortionists could have got lucky, or they could have had inside information. Here’s another thought—doesn’t your son have his own bedroom at your wife’s mother’s house, at Englewood?”

“Why, yes,”

“How many of these sleepers, how many sleepers just like this one, are there in a drawer in that Englewood nursery?”

“I don’t know. I don’t believe we have an exact inventory for such things.”

“Right. And how many servants do they have in that joint? Around thirty—any one of whom could have provided a description, or plucked a sleeping suit from a drawer. That would explain why it took several days for Cemetery John and crew to deliver those pj’s. And why it’s freshly laundered.”

He didn’t say anything.

“For that matter, Condon himself could’ve taken a sleeper from your son’s drawer.”

“Are you serious?”

“He could’ve, just like I could’ve. We both slept in that room. I caught Condon going through your kid’s toy box, remember?”

He said nothing; he was frowning.

I shook my head and drove. We were driving through farm country, now, that might well have been Illinois. I wished it were.

“Anne will know,” he said.

“What?”

“If it’s Charlie’s sleeping suit. Anne will know.”

I knew enough not to respond to that one.

We drove in silence again. I mulled a few things over that I didn’t share with him. How phony the German phrasing of the notes seemed to me, particularly in light of the Sicilian phrase—statti citto—in the phone call to Condon, and Condon’s own discovery of the Black Hand meaning of the “singnature” on the notes. This latest note again contained a suspicious number of correctly spelled, difficult words, among the misspelled smaller ones. And John in the cemetery used gangland phrases—“The boss would smack me out,” “drill us both.” I supposed a Scandinavian immigrant could have picked up such talk. But somehow it just didn’t ring true.

“The other day,” I said, breaking the silence as the black sky began turning gray, “you indicated there were other ‘parties,’ besides the professor, who might be in contact with the kidnappers. You wouldn’t want to let me in on any of that, would you?”

He didn’t hesitate in his response. “Actually, you should know. It involves your specialty: gangsters. It’s one of the reasons why I asked you to stick around.”

It seemed there was a socially prominent individual in Norfolk, Virginia, a certain Commodore John Hughes Curtis, who’d been approached by a bootlegger who claimed to be one of a gang of six who kidnapped Lindbergh’s son.

“Curtis is the president of one of the largest ship-building companies in the South,” Lindbergh said. “He has impeccable credentials—Admiral Burrage called me, in fact, to arrange a meeting between Curtis and myself.”

Now, added to the endless list of colonels, were an admiral and a commodore.

“Admiral Burrage,” Lindbergh explained almost defensively, reading my cynical expression no doubt, “was in command of the cruiser Memphis, the ship that brought me back from Paris.”

Back from his legendary solo transatlantic flight to Paris, he meant.

“Besides,” he said, “the Very Reverend H. Dobson-Peacock has vouched for Curtis, as well.”

Now we had a Reverend on the list. A Very Reverend.

“Who is this Peacock, anyway?”

“Reverend Dobson-Peacock is an old friend of the Morrow family. The Reverend was in charge of a church in Mexico City.”

The late Dwight Morrow had been Ambassador to Mexico; it was during that period that Anne Morrow and Charles Lindbergh met, wooed and fell in love.

“I’ve agreed to meet tomorrow afternoon with the Admiral, the Reverend and the Commodore,” he said. It sounded like a nursery rhyme. “I’d like you to sit in.”