Stolen Away

We landed on an airstrip in Long Island. Lindbergh had arranged for a car to be waiting at the Aviation Country Club at Hicksville. We piled in and rode in silence to Manhattan. The bundle of blankets, baby clothes and milk had been left behind in the seaplane. The milk was probably sour by now, anyway.

Lindbergh spoke for the first time as the car was stopped at a light in the Thirties on Third Avenue. “I’ll take you home, Professor.”

“Please don’t, Colonel,” Condon said; he was sitting between Irey and me, again, in the backseat. “Let me out here—I can get home very nicely on the subway.”

“I’ll take you.” Slim’s voice was strangely cold.

“It isn’t necessary,” Condon said, a certain desperation in his voice.

“All right.” Lindbergh swung over by the stairway of an uptown station. He turned and looked at us. His face was gaunt and grim. “We’ve been double-crossed, you know.”

Condon said nothing. His lips were trembling under the walrus mustache.

Lindbergh got out and let Condon out; in doing so, I had to get out as well, and I heard Slim coldly say to the professor, “Well, Doctor—what’s the bill for your services?”

I thought Condon was going to cry. His face fell farther than my stomach had on takeoff. Unbelievable as it seems, I felt sorry for the old boy.

“I…I have no bill,” he said.

Lindbergh seemed a little ashamed, suddenly. “I’d feel better if you let me reimburse you for…”

“No,” Condon said, with some dignity. “I never accept money from a man who is poorer than myself.”

With a nod to Lindbergh, and another to me, he descended into the subway station.

After Lindbergh dropped Irey and Breckinridge off at their respective stops in Manhattan, I shifted to the front seat and we began the ride back to Hope well. Again, I slipped off into sleep. When I awoke we were in the wilds of New Jersey.

Lindy smiled sadly over. “Among the living again, Nate?”

“Technically,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“Been thinking. Do you think the old boy took us for a ride?”

“Condon? I don’t know. I keep thinking about those Harlem spiritualists who knew about him before we did.”

Lindbergh nodded. “I’m not writing him off, just yet, or that ransom I paid. I’m heading out again, tomorrow. For another look.”

I shrugged. “Like you said, maybe all that naval activity frightened ’em off. Maybe they disguised the Nelly, stuck her in some secluded cove somewhere.”

“It’s possible,” he agreed, a little too eagerly. “I’ll call Newark airport when I get home—arrange for a monoplane.”

“Good.”

We rode in silence; the woods were on our either side.

Then he said, “Could you join me on the search, tomorrow? It would be just the two of us.”

“Well…okay. But no practical jokes, okay?”

He managed a smile. “Okay.”

He turned off Amwell Road onto the dirt of Featherbed Lane. Soon the big house came into view; though it was nearing midnight, a scattering of lights were on. People were up.

“Oh God,” he said. “This is going to be hard. Look at that.”

“What?”

“The nursery.”

The lights were on in that second-floor corner room, glowing like a beacon. A mother was waiting to welcome her baby.

22

For the mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, this was a small drawing room—almost intimate, its several couches grouped around another of the omnipresent gold-veined marble fireplaces, in which a fire was lazily crackling. The room had a sunken effect, an open stairway along one wall leading up to a balcony that looked down on us from four sides.

Evalyn was draped against one end of one couch, as if posing for a portrait in the classical style, only she was wearing the simple brown-and-yellow plaid bathrobe she’d worn the first time I saw her. The Hope diamond was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Mike the dog was wearing it; he was nowhere to be seen, either. In the shadows of the reflecting fire, her face was lovely, but she looked tired, and sad—or anyway melancholy, which is the wealthy’s way of feeling sad.

I was sitting nearby, enjoying her company, morose though it might at the moment be. Despite her eccentricities, I liked this woman. She was a good person with a good heart, and she smelled good, too. She had large, firm breasts and was very, very rich. What wasn’t to like?

But her melancholia was catching. I had the nagging sense that all of us—from Lindbergh to Breckinridge to Schwarzkopf to Condon to Agents Irey and Wilson to Commodore Curtis to Evalyn Walsh McLean to Chicago P.D. liaison Nathan Heller—were on a fool’s errand. I simply could not feel that child’s presence out there. After a month and a week, the idea of getting that kid back safely seemed about as likely as Charles Augustus Lindbergh listening to reason.