Protocol for a Kidnapping (2 page)

From the way his wheezes had rasped over the phone earlier that day I could tell that Myron Greene had been either angry or excited. Probably both. His asthma never bothered him when he talked to other clients. But then he could scarcely afford to get angry with six- and seven-hundred-million-dollar conglomerates, and the only excitement they ever supplied came but once or twice a year, if that often, when the Justice Department threatened an antitrust suit or two.

Nodding slightly at Greene, who refused to nod back, I moved quickly to the podium and informed the audience, now even more misty-eyed than ever, that because our temporary chairman’s sensitive nature precluded him from continuing, we would next hear from the founder and executive director of
CHEAPAR
, Park Tyler Wisdom III, who presumably was made of stronger stuff. That earned another round of applause from the audience, a faint cheer from the press, and an impatient, exasperated glare from Myron Greene.

Wisdom must have been all of thirty then, round of face, merry of eye, and possessed of that beaming confidence which comes from having inherited a seven-million-dollar trust fund from grandma at twenty-two. He had doffed his usual attire of sweat shirt and army surplus trousers in favor of a swallowtail coat, striped pants, a gray double-breasted vest, and a wing collar garnished by a plum-colored cravat. All in all, he looked very much like the slightly overweight second secretary of some pre-World War II Balkan embassy. The faintly tinted pince-nez that he wore did nothing to spoil the effect.

Waving the pince-nez around, Wisdom made a stirring five-minute pitch for contributions and succeeded in securing pledges that totaled nearly $1500. A few wrote checks on the spot. I moved over to him, whispered into his ear, and he beamed once more and held up his arms for attention.

“Mr. Philip St. Ives, our public relations secretary, informs me that
CHEAPAR’s
volunteer legal counsel has just arrived.” Wisdom pointed to the rear of the hall. “Could we have a nice round of applause for Mr. Myron Greene?” Old necks craned, arthritic hands clapped, and lined faces smiled and bobbed their greetings at Myron Greene who, looking completely miserable, did manage a half wave at the audience and a glare of sheer malevolence at me.

I was Myron Greene’s client chiefly because at thirty-six he still dreamed of becoming a flashy criminal lawyer or a gentleman racing car driver or an international troubleshooter or almost anything other than what he was: an extremely successful corporation attorney with offices on Madison, a home in Darien, and a 475-horsepower Shelby Cobra that he got to drive on weekends if he promised the wife and kids not to go over sixty-five.

By having me as a client, Greene mistakenly believed that he injected an occasional dose of excitement, intrigue, and God knows what else into what he considered to be his otherwise staid life. And if he usually had to pay for it with asthma, annoyance, and even anger, he seemed to feel that it was well worth the price and I was too diffident to tell him that it wasn’t.

Earlier in the day, Myron Greene had called and tried to explain, in between wheezes, that he had to see me immediately, within the hour—sooner, if possible. I’d interrupted him to ask, “You ever call that doctor I recommended?”

“What doctor?”

“The specialist in psychosomatic disorders.”

“My asthma is not a psychosomatic disorder and I resent your—”

“Calm down, Myron,” I’d said. “Take a deep breath.”

“Damn it,” he’d said, “what I have to see you about is important.”

“So is my meeting.”

Myron Greene had been silent for several moments. Not even a wheeze. He could have been counting to ten—or perhaps twenty. “All right,” he’d said finally, “how long does this circus of yours last?”

“Thirty minutes, I think. Maybe forty-five.”

“Well, I have to do downtown around four. I suppose I could stop by. Where is it again?”

I’d given him the address and he’d wheezed as he wrote it down. I assumed that he wrote it down. “This is the most childish—the most juvenile—”

“No, it isn’t, Myron.”

“If it’s not juvenile, what do you call it?”

“A noble cause,” I’d said and hung up.

Wisdom was explaining that we were holding a combination membership meeting and press conference and that he would now entertain questions from the press. If he couldn’t answer them, he was sure that Mr. St. Ives could, or perhaps Mr. Knight, providing that the chairman pro tem had recovered sufficiently from his emotional ordeal.

The man from the CBS television station was up first. Wisdom acknowledged him with a grand wave of the pince-nez. “Mr. Wisdom,” he said, “could you explain once more for our viewers just what
CHEAPAR
stands for?”

“Delighted,” Wisdom said,
“
CHEAPAR
is an acronym which stands for the Committee for Humane Extermination of All Park Avenue Rats.”

The
Daily News
wanted to know what was so special about Park Avenue rats. It was one of the questions that Wisdom was waiting for.

“You must understand,” he said with another fine flourish of the pince-nez, “that only recently have rats invaded Park Avenue. A number of residents there complained. I did so myself—as did most, if not all, of the ladies and gentlemen here today. This is understandable.”

He put the pince-nez back on his nose and started jabbing at the air with a forefinger. “I want to make it perfectly clear that
CHEAPAR
is no organization of bleeding hearts. We well recognize that rats, through no fault of their own, are often the carriers of dread disease.

“But,” he said, taking off the pince-nez and again holding it up for emphasis, “no sooner had our complaints been lodged than the city responded with what can only be described as terrifying alacrity. The Park Avenue rats were singled out for mass slaughter by the most barbaric means—as Mr. Knight tried to tell you before he was overcome by the horror of his own description.”

Wisdom paused to give Knight a benign look and Knight let the audience have another glance at his profile before he ducked it back into his handkerchief.

The
Post
reporter wanted to know what Wisdom suggested. “Decompression,” he answered quickly. “The rats should be captured alive in cagelike traps and then put to sleep in a chamber from which the air is almost instantaneously removed. The method is recommended by many humane societies. It’s quick and painless—just like taking a nice, long nap.” That got another fine round of applause from the audience. I noticed that Myron Greene now held his head in his hands.

A wire service reporter asked if
CHEAPAR
planned to limit its operations to the rats on Park Avenue.

“Certainly,” Wisdom answered with some asperity.

When the wire service man wanted to know why, Wisdom replied, “Because Park Avenue rats—and I don’t make this charge lightly—but Park Avenue rats are the only ones being discriminated against by the City of New York.”

Well, that was the lead and they all knew it and, as usual, they went along with Wisdom who could be counted on to brighten their day about seven or eight times a year. The girl from
The Village Voice,
struggling to keep a straight face, asked, “Can you explain what form this discrimination against Park Avenue rats takes as opposed, say, to the rats of Harlem or Greenwich Village or Bedford-Stuyvesant?”

“Indeed I can,” Wisdom said. “Take your average rat in Harlem. Nobody bothers him, particularly not the City. He’s left alone as long as he stays in Harlem. But let him try to improve his lot, let him try to move downtown to Park Avenue, and the vicious, discriminatory rat control forces are unleashed. He is clubbed, poisoned, and there is even talk of using—yes, there is! There are those who would use gas!” That produced a sharp chorus of no’s from the audience and another faint cheer from the press. Myron Greene was now slumped back in his chair, staring at the dirty ceiling. Knight whimpered a couple of times.

The
Times
man gave up a valiant battle to maintain his grave expression and asked, “Do you think, Mr. Wisdom, that politics or pressure may have caused this—uh—discrimination?”

“Possibly, sir, possibly. Thus far, we have had no complaints of rat brutality from any area other than Park Avenue. We of course hope that this is not a political football, but nevertheless we have asked Mr. St. Ives to investigate.”

“How about it, Phil?” the man from the
Post
asked.

I rose and nodded in what I hoped was a somber fashion. “Our preliminary survey,” I said, “indicates that both politics and pressure have played no small part in the discriminatory brutalization of Park Avenue rats. We’re preparing a White Paper on this and I hope to have copies of it to you within the next few days.”

There was a muffled groan from the rear that came from Myron Greene who had his head back in his hands.

After several more questions the man from the
Times
said, “Thank you, Mr. Wisdom,” and the press conference was over. The superannuated audience, representing a collective net worth of around a half-billion dollars, rose creakily and crowded about Wisdom and Knight to congratulate one and comfort the other.

I walked to the rear to find out what Myron Greene considered so important that he would stop off at a hired hall on his way downtown. After listening for ten minutes, I agreed that it might be important, even vital, but told him that I wasn’t interested. It took him another fifteen minutes to tell me why I was.

T
HERE HAD BEEN A
time, nearly five years ago, when I might have been sitting in that rented hall on Thirty-ninth Street with the rest of the press, feeding lines to Wisdom and Knight, more or less serving as an accommodating shill for their put-on.

But then it had been my job to write a column five times a week for a now defunct and largely un-mourned newspaper about the cards and cautions who infest New York. I had developed a breezy, perhaps irreverent style, the source material had been limitless, the hours flexible, and I found myself with a respectable readership and inexplicably the trust and confidence of a swarm of thieves, cops, hustlers, high rollers, con men, prophets, assorted saviors, bums, middle echelon Mafiosi, and people who seemed to spend most of their time hanging around telephone booths waiting for someone to call.

A small-time thief, who proudly described himself as Constant Reader, had stolen a goodly amount of jewelry from one of Myron Greene’s clients and then informed the lawyer that he was perfectly willing to sell it all back at nominal cost providing that I served as the go-between. I had done so because it provided material for a couple of fair columns that appeared just before the newspaper folded on Christmas Eve, a date much favored by publishers to suspend operations, possibly because of the attendant poignancy, but more probably because few persons really give a damn about reading a newspaper on Christmas Day.

Just as the last of my severance pay was running out three months later, I again was approached by Myron Greene, this time to serve as the intermediary or payoff man in the kidnapping of the son of a client of a fellow attorney who recalled how I had handled the jewelry thing. So for $10,000 in what Greene, to my dismay, insisted on calling “danger money,” I traded a satchel stuffed with $100,000 for the missing heir who, I felt—once we became acquainted—should have stayed missing.

The third time around I became Myron Greene’s client. He now negotiated my fees in exchange for ten percent of whatever I earned. He also reluctantly agreed to perform a few personal chores such as handling my divorce (his first and last such case), dispatching my alimony payments, paying my bills, and seeing to it that my quarterly income tax statements were filed on time. Since it couldn’t possibly have been the money that interested him, I decided that he harbored a sneaking admiration for the thieves, rogues, and mountebanks that I palled around with and it was a charge he never bothered to deny.

I found it to be a trade that needed neither advertising nor a hard-hitting publicity campaign. Word of mouth did nicely. Thieves who got caught recommended me to fellow inmates who were soon to be released. Insurance companies recommended me to their customers and to rival firms. Lawyers recommended me to other lawyers and sometimes even the police would damn me with a grudging bit of faint praise. “Well, he’s as honest as you could expect.” That sort of thing.

So if I didn’t quite prosper, I at least survived, sometimes going south in the winter and to Europe in the spring or fall, content with the three or four or even five assignments that came my way during a year and always sympathetic when each of them brought on another of Myron Greene’s asthma attacks.

The rest of the time I read, went to the films in the morning, played table stakes poker, chased and even caught a few girls, fed stray dogs and cats and the pigeons in Central Park, visited the galleries and some friendly bars, showed up at all parades, joined a few respectable demonstrations, and some not so respectable, took magazines and cigarettes to jailed thieves whom I’d done business with, dropped out of group therapy after one disastrous session, and sometimes just sat around in my “deluxe” efficiency apartment on the ninth floor of the Adelphi on East Forty-sixth Street and stared at the wall.

So it really wasn’t until the young thing from the
Daily News
called some four years after my own paper had folded and requested an interview that I realized I’d become, willy-nilly, one of those about whom I used to write: a social deviant, a professional pariah, even, for God’s sake, a character.

I had recently returned from Washington where I had almost bungled a job that had involved the theft of a priceless brass shield, a couple of feuding African nations, and the international oil crowd. Some people had been killed, one had been arrested with the shield in Rotterdam, and another was still sulking because he thought he had been cheated out of a few billion dollars’ worth of oil.

The young thing from the
Daily News
wanted to know all about the go-between calling, remarked that I must live a fascinating life, ate six brownies (the young today are constantly famished), and then trotted off to write up the lies I’d told her.