The Last Good Night (29 page)

Draper rose. “Of course. If we can do anything to help, anything at all, you'll let us know. In the meantime, we'll get out of your way.”

“They were only trying to help,” I said to David as he shut the door behind them.

“Help what?”

 

W
HEN
J
ERRY CALLED
later, offering his assistance, I asked him not to come.

I knew that his job was image, perception, play, damage control.

I even knew that I would need him again.

But I could not face him now.

 

T
HE PHONE RANG
all morning. Dougherty had come back to take up Flanders's post on the telephone, and each time it rang, we picked up simultaneously. “Hello?” I asked hopefully.

But it was never anyone we wanted, never anyone who could help us, never anyone with Sophie.

Dougherty flicked off the recorder and hung up his extension while I tried to get rid of whoever it was as quickly as possible, my heart sinking.

Frank Berkman called to offer sympathy, support. “Anything, anything at all you might need,” he said, “you just let us know.”
That great corporate “us.” The “us” that could do nothing for me now.

Susan Mahoney called, sighing and tsking as she commiserated, and subtly pumping me for details, for inside information.

Perry called.

Olivia Redding called.

Carla called to relay messages that had come into the office from numerous people, rich people, powerful people, people I had met at cocktail parties for a minute or two, who had called to offer help. “I'm praying for you,” she said. “We all are.”

“Thank you.”

Dora called so frequently to find out if we knew anything that we had to tell her we were trying to keep the line free and not to phone again.

I didn't want to speak to any of them.

They were on another shore now, across an infinite divide that no amount of their sympathy could conquer.

The phone rang once more. “I'll do it,” David said.

I watched while he and Dougherty picked up at the same moment.

“Hello?” David said.

He listened for a moment and then put his hand over the receiver. “It's Hartley,” he said to me while Dougherty hung up. “Do you want me to get rid of him?”

I started to nod and then I changed my mind. “No, I'll take it.”

David shrugged and waited while I went to pick up another extension.

“Laura,” Quinn said. “I know there's nothing I can say. What you're going through is unimaginable.” There was something in his voice, worn out, flat, far beyond the clumsiness of commiseration that even the best-intentioned could not avoid, that held me.

“Yes.”

We were quiet for a moment.

“All those times you come back from an assignment, from some horror,” I said, “and you feel so sorry for the people, but all the time you're thinking, Thank God it's not me.”

“And now it is you.”

“Yes.”

“They'll find her,” he said.

“Do you think so?”

“Yes. We report on miracles, too. Don't forget that.”

I was so desperate that I believed him and felt, for the briefest moment, better.

 

T
HE DOOR TO
Sophie's room was ajar.

I took a step in and turned on the lights. A soft white came to the frosted-glass shades, illuminating the eerie neatness.

I was eight months pregnant when we furnished Sophie's room, and the day we chose her furniture she lay still in my stomach. For weeks she had been kicking and swiveling against the walls of my body, restless and vehement. But that day, she did not move. When we got home from the furniture store I lay in bed reading a pregnancy handbook that spelled out all of the inherent dangers, all of the ways to lose the unborn. I tried everything they suggested to budge her, drinking sugary liquids, changing positions, tapping on my hard belly, until finally at one
A.M.
just as I was about to call the hospital, she awoke. I remember the sudden joy of that first kick—ah, here you are. Here you are again. I felt the outline of her foot through my skin and I clutched it while she moved.

Hope is a surprisingly sturdy affair. It withstands extraordinary assaults—absence, neglect, violence. It even withstands the imagination, the most subversive and effective weapon of all.

I pictured Sophie bruised.

I pictured her hungry, cold, wet, scared.

I pictured her alone, abandoned.

I pictured her until my bones ached from the inside out.

But I always believed that we would find her. The alternative was, as Quinn said, unimaginable.

I do not know what David believed. I never asked him, he never asked me.

It was easier to hope believing that he too thought we would find her. It was what bound us during those hours, bound us despite everything.

I stood by Sophie's window, peeking through the lace curtains, watching the streets turn dark on the press corps, the curiosity seekers, the neighbors walking home from work irritated by the invasion.

I recognized someone doing a remote from
Hard Copy,
and someone from the
New York Times,
which, we would soon find out, had decided to cover the people covering the event, as if that was somehow a more dignified approach.

I let the curtains fall and turned back inside.

 

D
OUGHERTY SAT IN
the living room eating take-out Chinese food and watching us from downcast eyes. The first few times I passed him I smiled wanly, and then I didn't bother. I was anecdote to him, something to tell the boys back at the precinct about, something to tell the wife.

Maybe that wasn't fair.

Maybe he had kids, too. Maybe he thought about missing them, losing them. I don't know. I didn't ask.

He sat tentatively on the edges of the velvet couch, as if he was afraid to spoil it, and glanced about the well-appointed room. It looked suddenly alien to me as well, the Aubusson rug, the precious traveling clock, the Mies van der Rohe table, the
decorator touches, someone else's idea of a life I no longer had. I don't think I ever had it to begin with, not really.

The smell of grease from Dougherty's General Chao's chicken made me ill and I rushed to the bathroom and threw up.

At six-thirty I flipped on the television in the bedroom and watched Quinn begin to speak. “Good evening,” he said. “As you may have heard, my esteemed colleague, Laura Barrett, is in the midst of some personal difficulties which we have every hope will be quickly and happily resolved.” He looked directly into the camera and his solemn face filled the screen. “On behalf of all the people here at the
National Evening News,
let me say that our prayers are with you and your family, and we look forward to your speedy return.” He waited a beat, glanced down and began again. “And now, the news. Earlier today, the President met with the Speaker of the House to iron out…”

I turned off the television and sat down, picking at my cuticles until they bled.

 

A
ND THEN, AT
8:04, it came, what we were waiting for, hoping for, dreading.

I picked up the phone on the second ring. “Hello?”

Dougherty was listening in on an extension, his hand over the receiver.

There was a deep breath.

“Hello?” I asked again.

Another breath, a pause.

“Who is this?” I demanded impatiently.

“I have your baby.”

I let out a single sharp cry. “Oh my God. Where is she? Where's Sophie?”

“I want five hundred thousand dollars by two
A.M.
Wait for me on the third row of benches at the departure gate of the
Staten Island Ferry. If I see cops, I'm gone. And so is your baby.” The man's voice was muffled, unrecognizable.

“Is she all right? Is Sophie all right? Please, let me hear her,” I pleaded.

“She's safe,” he said.

“Please just let me hear her.”

“Two
A.M.
” He hung up.

“Wait, please…” I shook the dead receiver in my hands. “Wait…”

Dougherty looked up, grinning. “Got it.” He had the phone number scrawled on a pad.

I clasped David's trembling hands in mine. “She's okay,” I cried. “She's okay. We're going to get her back.”

“I don't believe it,” he said, kissing my cheek, my neck.

We hugged tightly for the first time.

Dougherty was already on the phone to the precinct. As soon as he got off, he said, “It's a pay phone. They'll find where it was located. The place will be crawling before this guy knows what hit him. Harraday's on his way here to go over procedure.”

“You heard him, no cops,” David said.

“Look, we don't know who this guy is. We don't even know if he really has your daughter.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, horrified.

“It could be real,” Dougherty replied, “or it could be anyone who reads the papers. Either way, the best chance you have of getting your baby back is cooperating with us. We know what to do.”

David and I looked at each other, terrified of making the wrong decision.

“All right,” David said at last.

When Harraday arrived he told us that the phone the blackmailer had called from was inside the ferry terminal. “I've already sent plainclothesmen out there. They'll be in the park, in subway stations, they'll be in the streets. They'll be everywhere,” he said. “And the money's on its way.”

“From where?” David asked.

“We have a fund for things like this.”

“You'll give him all of it?”

Harraday glanced away. “Sometimes we put in phony money, sometimes we mix up the two.” He looked back up to me. “But it's real this time, all real. Marked, of course, but real.”

“Good.”

“TARU's sending over a special suitcase, too.”

“What kind of suitcase?”

“It'll have trace-and-tracking capabilities. We'll have a car positioned nearby that can follow wherever it goes.”

“You mean in case you lose him?”

“Sometimes we have to let them go a little if we think they'll lead us to the baby.”

“But I thought he was going to bring her to the terminal.” My panic rose.

“Did he say that?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Precisely. He didn't say anything about Sophie's location at all. Even if he did, it wouldn't mean anything. Whoever made that phone call is not exactly a paragon of virtue. We're not about to take his word for anything. It's strange that he didn't tell you to drop the money.”

“Drop it?”

“In a garbage can, under a bench. There were no directions about that.”

“What do you think that means?”

“I don't know. For some reason, he might want a face-to-face encounter with you. Or he might have other plans. We'll have to be ready for a number of contingencies.”

“Oh God, please just let him have her. It's a good sign, isn't it?” I asked. “Isn't it a good sign that he called?”

“It's a good sign,” Harraday said. “Now, let's get to work. We've got five hours to get this right.”

I
T WAS EXACTLY
one-thirty when we left the building in a taxi for the trip downtown to the tip of Manhattan. The driver, a plainclothes cop, said nothing as we sped through city streets that were nearly empty in the nowhere hour between midnight and dawn. David and I held hands in the backseat, the suitcase beside us, as the car wove through the narrow winding streets of the financial district.

When we reached the terminal, we got out alone and walked up the curved ramp to the new building, rebuilt after a devastating fire a few years earlier.

Inside, the vast space was nearly barren, filled only with the ghosts of commuters who in just a few hours would jam through, clutching papers and coffee, jostling each other, glancing at their watches as they hurried to work. The lights hanging from the aqua pipes overhead shone on the few homeless people asleep on the benches, a bag lady in tattered stockings hugging armfuls of day-old newspapers as she chanted an indecipherable mantra, a young man in a navy warm-up suit waiting for the boat. Though
I was not supposed to, I searched their faces, trying to discern who might be plainclothes cops.

And I looked for Sophie, looked for her in the corners and the crevices near the shuttered newsstand, behind the change machine, looked for her knowing that she wouldn't be out in the open but hoping nonetheless that I would see her on a bench, in a stranger's arms, waiting for me, for us.

David walked beside me, carrying the suitcase. When we got to the departure gate, we stopped. Overhead, a clock told us that the next ferry would leave in twenty-three minutes. Outside the wall of windows, we saw the East River, black and still, and in the distance, the Statue of Liberty. A few yards away, a man was sweeping and the rhythmic swiping of the broom melded with our hearts beating out of time, the precise sound of our waiting.

I looked at my watch. It was one-fifty-six.

No one appeared to be watching us. No one approached.

I heard David's stomach grumble.

One-fifty-seven.

At exactly one-fifty-nine, a thin wiry man in a black knit ski mask, the kind they sell on the street as soon as the weather turns cold, darted out of the men's room.

My pulse quickened as I clutched David's hand.

The man looked quickly to his left and right and then hurried toward us.

He was empty-handed. There was no sign of Sophie.

His eyes were focused only on the suitcase, the prize.

In a second, he was beside us, grabbing the leather handle.

But David grasped it tightly, pulling the man to him. “David,” I whispered.

He let go and the man swiveled around. We watched as he ran toward the side door and down the ramp, clutching the suitcase to his chest.

I looked hurriedly about the terminal, expecting Sophie to suddenly appear, but all I saw were three plainclothes cops tear out and another two run to check the bathrooms. They came out shaking their heads. The benches were empty. She was not on the floor. She was nowhere. I sobbed as we began to run after him.

By the time the man had gotten to the bottom of the ramp he was surrounded by nine policemen, their guns drawn. “All right, freeze! Now!” one of them yelled.

The man swiveled around, looking both ways. There was no place to go. There were more cops behind him, and beneath the ramp, only the black and icy river.

When David and I reached the cluster, two cops were holding the man's arms to cuff him. Harraday stepped forward and squeezed through the cops still kneeling, their guns aimed steadily at the man's chest. Harraday grabbed the wool mask from the bottom and yanked it off roughly.

“Christ,” I exclaimed.

Cort Joseph stared at the ground with his rheumy eyes and runny nose.

“Where's our baby?” David demanded.

Cort looked up, panicky and shell-shocked. “I don't got her,” he cried.

“Where is she?”

“I don't know.”

“What do you mean, you don't know?”

“I didn't take her.” He was shaking now, shaking all over.

“Who did?”

A policeman began to read Cort his Miranda rights.

“I don't know,” he repeated, ignoring the familiar words. “I swear to you. I don't know anything about her.”

“Where is she? Where's Sophie?” I felt hysteria rising up my throat, escaping.

Cort looked away. “Fuck.”

“Please. Please just tell us where she is,” I implored him.

“How many times I gotta say it? I didn't take her, man. I just read about it in the papers,” Cort said. “I just, you know, wanted some money. You got to believe me.” Mucus ran down from his nostrils.

David lurched forward and grabbed Cort's neck, his large hands tightening about it as he shook him until the cords began to pop out. “You fucking turd.”

The cops watched impassively for a few long seconds before they pulled David off.

“He's ours,” Harraday said.

Without another word, they hurried Cort into an unmarked police car waiting at the bottom of the ramp.

 

B
Y THE TIME
David and I arrived at the precinct house on West Tenth Street, Cort was already booked and being questioned upstairs. Flanders was waiting for us. “Come on, I'll take you to the interrogation room. Excuse me, the interview room.” He shook his head. “I'm surprised we're even allowed to call them cells anymore.” We followed him up a dark dusty staircase to the second floor and then down a long corridor lined with gray steel lockers past the Bomb Squad room with a red blow-up of a torpedo hanging over its door. “This way,” he said, as he led us through the detectives' main area filled with cluttered desks and typewriters into a small cubicle stuffed with case files and a computer. Flanders turned off the lights and we peered through the rectangular two-way mirror to the adjoining room where Harraday and Carelli were questioning Cort.

“We're just interested in the truth here,” Harraday said calmly. “Everyone makes mistakes. I understand. Why don't you just tell us how it got started?”

Carelli was standing in front of the door, as if to show Cort that the only way out was to deal with him.

“Cort, we want to help you,” Harraday continued. “But it's a two-way street. You're going to have to talk to us.” He smiled amiably. “They say confession is good for the soul.”

“I want a lawyer. Get me a fucking lawyer.”

“You're gonna need more than a goddamned lawyer to get out of this one, boy,” Carelli said harshly. “You're gonna need divine intervention. Now why don't you just start giving us some answers? What the fuck were you thinking?”

Even before Harraday came out to talk to us we knew that Cort was telling the truth, that he had read the papers in the morning and gotten the idea to cash in. I had given him my private number when I went looking for Shana two weeks ago. It must have looked easy to him with his junk-addled brain. Detectives had been dispatched to search his apartment on Stanton Street, but I knew that they would find nothing.

“What happens to him now?” I asked.

“We charge him with extortion. That's grand larceny, second degree.”

“How long will he get?”

“Well, it's a felony. Minimum, a year and a day.”

“I'd like to kill that little fuck,” David said as we made our way back downstairs, past the large American flag and out of the precinct house.

 

I
T WAS STILL
dark when we returned home.

Upstairs, I went into the bathroom and washed my face. When I looked into the mirror, my cheeks, my eyes, seemed to be sinking beneath the bones, all shadows and caves. I saw in the reflection intimations of the old woman I would be, gaunt, hollow as a death mask.

I dried my face and went back out to David.

There is a separate language for nightmare. Terse, objective.
As if any adornment, any use of adjective would open a floodgate that could never be closed.

“Are you okay?” David asked.

I nodded. “You?”

“Yes.”

We sat down on the edge of the bed, our palms resting open on our knees.

I moved my hand slowly over to his, tentatively, desperately, and he took it, his fingers closing around mine.

And then our other hands, our arms.

I felt his pulse, his heat, his exhaustion as I collapsed against him. He turned and grasped me fiercely and we fell back onto the bed, grappling, pulling and pushing at each other, tearing clothes off, our mouths open as we gasped for air, for flesh, for release. It had nothing to do with desire or love or pleasure. We were beyond that, caught in our private hell, trapped in it, united in it. He slammed into me, deeper and deeper, our bodies crashing into each other with each thrust.

But when we came to, nothing had changed.

We lay without touching, unable to look each other in the eyes.

“Try to get some sleep,” David said, and pulled the quilt about us.

 

I
CLOSED MY
eyes, finally drifting into that bottomless gray air between consciousness and sleep, suspended, unrelieved, falling deeper, when it wriggled into my marrow, piercing my dreams, the stabbing sobs of breath Sophie cried when she awoke.

I bolted out of bed, still tangled in sleep, running down the hallway to get her.

I slammed open her door and bent down to the crib open-armed, ready to scoop her up, comfort her—
I'm here
.

It was only when I saw the empty mattress that I fully awoke and remembered.

Sophie was gone.

Outside, I heard the neighbor's cat wailing.

I shut my eyes and listened for a long time before I went back to bed.

 

I
LAY WATCHING
the sky gradually lighten.

This is one of the things that haunts me: I don't truly remember what Sophie looked like when she was born. I replay those first hours over and over again, but I cannot quite find her in them.

And something else, something I am deeply ashamed of: When the nurse's aide wheeled Sophie in, snug in her bassinet, the first morning, I didn't recognize her. “I don't think that's my baby,” I said. The aide, her face impatient and censorious, checked the plastic bracelet and assured me that it was.

It was only later that I felt it, her flesh as mine.

I would give anything to have those first moments back, knowing her, loving her as I do now.

David slept lightly beside me, grinding his teeth in slow angry circles. There was a time when he used to laugh in his sleep, his mouth curling into a delighted smile, his closed eyes crinkling.

It was just past six when I heard the elevator door open, the thump of the neighbors' papers being delivered, and then ours.

I walked past Flanders, dozing on the couch, undid the chain lock, and opened the door. The tabloids were on top. The
Post
and the
Daily News
both had pictures of me on their covers.

I turned to the
Post
first.

On page three, I began to read….

New Information in Case of Anchorwoman's Missing Baby

New information has come to light in the case of network anchor Laura Barrett, whose six-month-old daughter was abducted three days ago. Our sources have learned that the day before the infant disappeared, Miss Barrett received a threatening package that included a photograph of the Breezeway Inn in Flagerty, Florida. On the back, there was an inscription, “Everyone has to pay. Even you.” The girl in the photograph was Laura Barrett, or as she was known then, Marta Deuss Clark.

It was at the Breezeway Inn, owned by Miss Barrett's mother, Astrid Deuss Clark, and her stepfather, Garner Clark, on the night of August 26, 1976, that Frank Xavier died in an altercation. Jack Pierce, a friend of Miss Barrett's at the time, was arrested and stood trial for…

 

I fell back against the kitchen wall, breathless.

I had dreamt of this, of course. My name,
names,
laid bare.

I had dreamt of being split apart, opened. Revealed.

For years, I had dreaded it so fiercely that the very thought made me sick with night sweats and sores that I picked into my arms in my sleep.

I had thought it was the worst thing that could happen.

Now it was just another cog of a nightmare far more horrific.

I threw the paper into the trash atop the banana peels and coffee grounds.

 

B
Y THE TIME
David woke up an hour later, the size of the press corps outside our building had tripled.

“David,” I said carefully, “the papers got hold of the story about Xavier.”

“How did that happen?” he asked as he sat up in bed.

“Someone from the police department must have leaked it. I'm going to kill Harraday.”

“How bad is it?”

“There are no specific allegations about my role in Xavier's death. I'm sure even the
Post
's lawyers had to veto that, but it's still pretty bad. Do you want to see them?” I asked.

“Why the fuck would I want to see them? I'm living with it. Isn't that enough?”

Something crashed against the bedroom window.

“What the hell was that?” David exclaimed.

“I'll go look.” I walked over to the window. When I peeled the curtains back to investigate, a million cameras clicked.

I let the curtains fall and buried my face in my hands.

 

D
AVID GOT OUT
of bed, showered.

When I went to the kitchen to get us both coffee, I found Flanders, standing at the counter in his sleep-wrinkled suit, reading the wet and soiled copy of the
Post
. He looked up, flushed. He did not say good morning, but I caught him glancing back curiously at me, searching for—what? Pieces of a past he thought he could suddenly lay claim to? A truth, some inexorable truth that he could seize and hold against me? Or was he looking for the lie in my face, my voice, my name?