Stolen Away

I had gone up in the sky with Lindbergh again, at daybreak Monday, on the heels of the unfruitful Sikorsky search Sunday; smoothly guiding a Lockheed-Vega monoplane, the Lone Eagle combed the coastal waters of the Atlantic, and the Lone Passenger—me—helped him look. I was no longer bothered by flying—or maybe it was that Slim was taking it so much easier, not swooping down so suddenly, or skimming the sea’s skin so recklessly. He brought with him another blanket and a small suitcase of Charlie’s clothes; no milk this time. We flew over the Elizabeth Islands and Martha’s Vineyard, Coast Guard cutters still patrolling the Sound, the surface of which was as dark blue that day as Evalyn’s famous bauble.

No craft resembling the Nelly turned up, and by noon Lindy’s face had taken on a stony despondence. He didn’t say so, but I knew he was thinking of Commodore Curtis and the Norfolk contingent when, as afternoon blurred into evening, he swung as far south as Virginia.

The night before, Slim had come home to Hopewell empty-handed to comfort his waiting wife in the doorway; this night, the house again blazing with light, the nursery once more waiting for its tiny charge, Lindbergh met Anne in the doorway and fell into her arms. The tiny woman was patting the tall man’s stooped back like a child when I slipped silently away, feeling an intruder, finding the flivver I’d been given to use and heading to my suite at the Old Princeton Inn, knowing that this was over, but also knowing no one was quite ready, or able, to admit it. Certainly not Slim Lindbergh.

In the days that followed, Lindbergh allowed Condon to place another ad (“What is wrong? Have you crossed me? Please, better directions—Jafsie”) that brought no response. I spent several evenings at Condon’s, with Breckinridge, waiting for nothing. The professor’s spirits were low.

Condon had made a positive contribution, it seemed, by leading a federal agent to a shoe impression in the dirt of a freshly covered grave at St. Raymond’s, where “John” had jumped a fence along the cemetery’s access road. A moulage impression was made, waiting for eventual comparison to any captured suspects.

As the week wore on, Elmer Irey asked, and got, Lindbergh’s permission to distribute to banks a fifty-seven-page booklet listing the serial numbers of the 4,750 bills Jafsie had paid John. This seemed to me relatively pointless: bank tellers aren’t in the habit of noting the serial numbers of the bills they handle, and the booklet made no mention of the Lindbergh kidnapping.

A few days later, however, a bank teller in Newark figured out the booklet’s purpose, proposed his theory to a reporter and it was soon all over the wire services. Now that the list of numbers was labeled “Lindbergh” and published in the papers, shopkeepers started posting it near their cash registers. The first bill spotted, a twenty, turned up at a pastry shop in Greenwich, Connecticut.

“Now we’ve had it,” Lindbergh had said glumly, the day the wire services ID’ed the serial numbers list. “The kidnappers will never resume negotiations.”

“Slim,” I said. “They got their dough. Days ago, There aren’t going to be any more negotiations.” We were sitting in the kitchen of the house, both of us covered with soot and smelling of smoke. My morning as a detective had been spent helping Lindbergh, a dozen or so troopers, and butler Ollie Whately beat out a brushfire. We were alone—the smoke had sent the women of the house retreating to the Morrow house in Englewood. I was drinking a cold-sweating bottle of bootleg beer. Slim was drinking ice water.

“Besides,” I continued, “these may not even be the kidnappers—this could be an extortion scheme, plain and simple.”

“You saw the sleeping suit yourself, Nate….”

“Right! You got sent a standard-issue pair of kid’s pajamas to prove Charlie’s identity. Why not a photo? Or a lock of hair? Or something with your boy’s fingerprints on it?”

“We’ve been through that,” he said softly, unsurely.

I sighed heavily, sat forward; the backs of my hands were black. “Do you remember why I’m here? The name Al Capone ring a bell? You wouldn’t play Capone’s game, remember? And now he’s sitting back in Cook County Jail, waiting for his last appeal to be turned down.”

Face smudged with soot, Lindbergh gave me a testy look. “What’s your point?”

I spread my white-palmed black hands like Jolson singing “Mammy.” “If Capone took your boy, using his East-Coast bootleg gang connections to do so, he had to figure out long ago that he fucked up.”

His eyes were slits. “What do you mean?”