Stolen Away

“I’ve already called for an amphibian,” Lindbergh said, eyes bright as glowing coals, “and as soon as it’s light, we’ll take off.”

“Sit down, gentlemen, please,” Irey said, gesturing to the table, looking first at Lindy, the professor and Breckinridge, but at myself and Wilson, too. We all gathered around the table, and sat.

Lindbergh and Condon told the story, the former doing most of the talking, but the latter taking over at the points when center stage of the melodrama became his.

The note the cabbie had delivered directed them to follow Tremont Avenue east until they reached 3225, a nursery, J. A. Bergen Greenhouse and Florist. There they would find a table outside the florist shop entrance, and underneath the table would be a letter covered by a stone. The letter directed them to cross the street, walk to the next corner and follow Whittemore Avenue to the south. They were to bring the money. Condon was to come alone. He would be met.

“As we approached Whittemore Avenue,” Condon said, leaning forward, his eyes rheumy but intense, “I realized that these wily kidnappers were duplicating their precautions from the previous meeting.”

“Why is that?” Irey asked.

Wilson was taking notes.

“Whittemore Avenue,” Lindbergh said, “is a dirt road running parallel to St. Raymond’s Cemetery.”

Another graveyard.

The professor raised a finger in the air like a Bible-beating preacher making a point about heaven, or hell. “For the second time,” he said, “our meeting was on a Saturday night. And for the second time, our rendezvous took place…” He looked at each of us significantly; his expression, in the orange reflection of the nearby fireplace, was that of a senile scoutmaster telling a singularly unscary ghost story around a campfire. “…in the city of the dead.”

And me without any marshmallows to roast.

“As I told the Colonel,” Condon confided, winking at Irey, who acknowledged the wink not at all, “I have heard that Italian gangsters frequently frequent graveyards….”

Frequently frequent? What was this clown a professor of, anyway? Redundancy?

“And our pair of cemetery conferences,” Condon continued, “would tend to confirm my belief that the gang is a mixture of Mafia members and the Scandinavian, ‘John.’”

Lindbergh, thankfully, picked up the story at that point.

Condon had stood outside the car, reading the note by flashlight, hoping to attract the attention of any lookout that the kidnap gang might have posted. A man in a brown suit approached, brim of his brown felt hat pulled down; he walked with a decided stoop. When he passed the car, he covered the bottom half of his face with a handkerchief, eyeballing the two men.

When the apparent lookout was out of sight, Lindbergh began to climb out of the coupe, but Condon stopped him: the note had said that the professor must come alone.

But Jafsie was less of a stickler about the note’s other directions: he left both the ballot box and the separate packet of money behind, telling Lindy, “I want to talk to John first.” And he had walked east, not south, on Whittemore—“This enabled me to look behind most of the tombstones and bushes that fronted the avenue.”

Peering into the “eerie semidarkness” of the cemetery, however, Condon saw nothing but shadows.

When he had walked past the cemetery gates, Condon turned and walked slowly back; he called out to Lindbergh, “There seems to be no one here, Colonel.”

A voice called, then, from behind a tombstone: “Hey, Doctor!”

A figure rose specterlike from behind a gravestone.

“Hey, Doctor—over here!”

Both Condon and Lindbergh heard the voice, which they described as “guttural.”

Condon moved toward the tombstone, but the figure moved away, and the professor followed him into the cemetery, where, after zigzagging among the graves, the figure crouched behind a hedge.

“I said to him, ‘What are you doing crouched down there—stand up if you want to talk to me!’” Condon was gesturing theatrically; Lindbergh didn’t seem to mind, but Wilson looked up from his note-taking to roll his eyes at me, discreetly. Condon was saying, “He asked me if I remembered him from that other Saturday night, at Woodlawn Cemetery. I said I did. He asked, ‘Have you got it, the money?’ And I said, no, I didn’t bring any money. That it was up in the car.”

Cemetery John had then asked if Colonel Lindbergh was armed, and the professor had said no (“I lied,” he said, proud of himself), and then John demanded his money.

“I refused” Condon told us. “I said, ‘Not until you give me a receipt!’”

“A receipt?” I said. “You asked the kidnapper for a receipt?”

“It was a business transaction of sorts,” Condon said, stiffly, defensively. “I was well within my rights to demand a written receipt, paying over such a sum.”

Irey looked stunned; Wilson, frozen in his note-taking, had the expression of a man examining shit on his shoe.

“Further, I demanded a note specifying where the baby is—and that, gentlemen, is the very note.” He pointed to the small note, which still lay on the table, like a cocktail napkin.