“It’s something to do with you, I think,” Leonard says. “With school?”
“You think it’s Celandine?”
“It isn’t Celandine. They haven’t even heard of Celandine. That isn’t it.”
“What, then? What do you think they’re looking for?”
He shrugs. “Search me. Whatever it is, we haven’t got it, have we? Or they haven’t found it.” Some kind of error, they decide. Some farcical blunder.
“The wrong address entirely?” Francine suggests.
“They have your name. They called you Mrs. Lessing, didn’t they? They do know who you are.”
Their house has almost emptied. Only the NADA agent remains. When Leonard and Francine return downstairs, ready to demand explanations, he is standing in the living room, studying the row of historic framed jazz posters on the wall—old concert programs signed and personalized for Leonard by Carla Bley, Dave Douglas, and Natty “the Gnat” Nicolson, an older generation of jammers.
“Play an instrument?” he asks, addressing neither of them in particular and not waiting for an answer. He stabs his finger at the folder he is holding. “Everything is here,” he says. “The tenor saxophone, yes?” and he looks up, smiling, much amused, it seems. “Happy birthday, Mr. Lessing. It’s today. Correct?”
“Some birthday,” Leonard says.
“Apologies if we have spoiled the festivities. Some questions, though. Then I’ll hope to leave the two of you in peace.” He flashes his photo fob and agent ID for a second time but holds them steady, requiring Leonard and Francine to verify the details. His name, Leonard is unnerved to read, is Rollins, though Simon rather than Sonny. He pulls his folder open and holds up a photograph. “Do either of you know, have either of you seen, this girl?”
“No idea,” says Francine, spreading her hands and fingers as if to say, Enough of this.
Leonard takes a half step forward. Puts a hand out. “Let me see,” he says. He knows the face at once. It’s clearly Lucy Emmerson, aged about fourteen and not yet sexy and theatrical but puppy-plump and bored. The hair, though, is unmistakable, already thick and piled. He holds her portrait with both hands, because he’s shaking slightly. Not Francine, then. He’s the one they’ve come for. It’s about the “kidnapping.” Why had he ever doubted it? He makes his mind up straightaway. This photo’s three or four years old, an imperfect likeness. He can lie about it if he wants. It’s best not to volunteer any information but to stay his hand. There’s nothing on his conscience, nothing illegal anyway. Whatever they have found to link him to this girl’s disappearance cannot be against the law, unless buying alcohol for a minor or driving with wine in his bloodstream is a serious enough crime to warrant the attentions of so many men. This is just routine, he suspects. Heavy-handed and routine. Someone, maybe Nadia, has mentioned his long-past connection with Maxie. The police are simply checking, as they should, given that they must believe this kidnapping is genuine. He will not betray his new young friend. He owes her that.
“It isn’t Celandine, that’s for sure,” he says.
“You’ve never spoken to this girl? Lucy Katerina Emmerson. Either of you?” He lets them shake their heads before turning to another printout sheet. “Then please explain the phone log that I have for calls made and received within the past forty-eight hours by phones registered to you. Thursday night, ten-seventeen p.m.: a male using your cell, Mr. Lessing, calls Lucy Emmerson’s grandfather, seeking her home number. Ten twenty-eight p.m.: a male using your cell, Mr. Lessing, speaks to Lucy’s mother, claiming to have located her stolen bike—”
“What is this, Leonard? Is this you?” Francine has whitened again.
“The same male also talks with Lucy herself, according to her mother. More about the bike, she thinks. Friday, nine-oh-two a.m., that’s only yesterday: Lucy Emmerson calls this same number, Mr. Lessing, from her own handset. That conversation lasts, let’s see, for thirteen minutes. There’s more.” He smiles again. Rollins is warming to his task. “Five thirty-six p.m., last evening. Somebody, could be anyone who has access to your handset, Mr. Lessing, reaches this young woman’s answer service but, in spite of being invited to ‘do what you have to do,’ chooses not to leave a message. Two minutes later, five thirty-eight p.m., a man using your cell again, Mr. Lessing, speaks to Miss Emmerson’s grandfather at the family home. And that conversation lasts for just four seconds. Though long enough for us to make a note of it—”
“Bravo,” says Leonard.
“Now, let me show another face to you.” He does not even hold it up for Francine but hands it immediately to Leonard. It’s Maxim Lermontov, a recent formal photograph with a police detention tag attached to it and a committal number. “Ring any bells with you?”
“It’s the guy who’s taken hostages.”
“Know him personally?”
“Used to. Once. Long time ago.”
“Seen him recently?”
“Haven’t seen him since, oh, 2006.”
“Been in touch in any other ways?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Final warning. What do those words mean to you?”
“They mean what they mean in plain English.”
“But otherwise?”
“A protest group. A violent protest group.”
“How would you know that, Mr. Lessing?”
“From the television. On the news. Yesterday. I watch the news. I keep myself informed.”
The NADA agent shakes his head. “This makes no sense to me,” he says, and chins a smile at Francine as if to ask if
this
makes any sense to her. He shows he’s happy when she shakes her head. “Your wife is mystified.”
“Explain,” she says. Either one of you, she means.
“What do we have?” Rollins continues, turning now to Francine as he might to a baffled colleague for help. “We have a girl your husband says he’s never met or spoken to, and yet some male has used his phone to contact her or someone in her family—what?” He turns to his folder, quickly counts the log. “Five times at least. Five times that we know of. We have a hostage situation thanks to a guy armed to the teeth, a guy who’s been a friend of your husband, a guy we’ve been informed by Lucy’s mother was someone Mr. Lessing here was involved with”—he checks his paper once again—“in Austin, Texas. Snipers Without Bullets.” He turns to Leonard again. “Is that you?”
“It was. For about two days. Eighteen years ago. This is very tenuous.”
“Possibly.”
“Then wouldn’t you be better off arresting burglars?”
The young man nods and closes his folder. He’s looking less amused. “Better watch the old blood pressure, Mr. Lessing. Deep breaths are called for, don’t you think? Might well be sensible. Let’s leave it there for the moment, shall we? Unless there is something helpful you can contribute.”
Leonard takes a calculated risk. “I haven’t wanted to mention it to anyone, but it’s true, Lucy Emmerson and I have been in touch. Once in a while. Over the years,” he says. “I’m like her kind of unofficial godfather. So obviously I tried to talk to her by phone when all this stuff blew up with Maxie. That’s all there is to it.”
“Mr. Lessing, let’s be straight with each other before I go and before it’s too late. You understand the penalties, I’m sure, for withholding information in security matters, for wasting police time.”
“You’re wasting our time, that’s the truth of it.”
“Mr. Lessing, people’s lives are in danger here, not just the girl’s. This is serious. This is perilous. This is what we need to know. Your final chance. Can you throw any light, any light at all, on the whereabouts of Lucy Katerina Emmerson? Or who it is that’s taken her?”
It’s true, it’s mostly true, what Leonard says. “I haven’t got the foggiest.”
T
HE HOUSE WILL HAVE TO WAIT
, Francine says, when her “fathomless” husband starts slamming drawers and fretting about the disarray—open cupboards, piles of clothes and bedding—that the officers, like teenagers, have left in their home. “Leave it, leave it, leave it,” she insists, making him sit on the futon in front of a muted telescreen—pushing him, even—while she remains standing, her arms crossed, being heavily patient as if she is dealing with a bulky infant. Leave it, she means, until her anger has subsided. Leave it until she knows how big this problem is. “Now talk. No bullshit either, Birthday Boy.”
He tells her almost everything: his failure on Wednesday evening to pass on information to the authorities, his surreptitious Thursday visit to the hostage house, the talk, the drink, the cigarettes with Lucy Emmerson, her genius idea, his loss of nerve, his Friday decoy visit to the woods, the log of phone calls that of course have been so simple for the police to trace. “Such amateurs,” Francine says, still standing. She doesn’t mean the police. “You know what maddens me the most, Leonard?” He shakes his head. He doesn’t want to know. “It’s not the lies. It’s not your secrecy. God knows I’m used to that. You think I care anymore? It’s that you never even offered me the chance.”
“I was protecting you,” he says, not really knowing what he means by it.
“Protecting me from what? Another one of your backdowns? Protecting me from offering an opinion, from saying, ‘Yes, let’s have her here, your little hush-hush goddaughter. Let’s help this poor girl reach her father in some way, let’s all do what we can to put an end to this monstrous nonsense with the hostages in Cedarbeech—’”
“Alderbeech.”
“Protecting me from making you do something ill-advised for once, not rational, not sensible? You weren’t protecting me. You were protecting you!”
“You wouldn’t have wanted me to go ahead with it. Would you?”
“I would have wanted you either to call the police and tell them what you knew or to … to …
arghh.”
Here she tightens her fists, knuckles up, and shakes them at Leonard. “I would have loved you for it, actually.”
“If I’d brought Lucy here?”
“Of course, of course, of course. What do you take me for?” She brings a fist down on her open palm. It always quiets the class. “Right now I’d really like to beat you up.”
The worst is over. No one’s hurt. Francine and Leonard are sitting side by side on the futon—not touching, though, and for the moment preferring to listen to the television newscaster rather than face each other anymore. The news blackout has been relaxed, it seems. Whereas yesterday live coverage from Alderbeech was rationed and controlled, today the wraps are off. The UK station that they settle on provides a menu for the hostage scene: Background, Security Briefing, Mother’s Plea, Latest Developments. They open the last of these. It is “the standoff’s fourth tense day” already. A routine has been established. Here are St. John Ambulance Brigade officers, stripped of shoes and coats, delivering yet more pizzas for the hostages and the uncooked food and unopened tins and bottles that the hostage-takers have required. Here are helicopters “standing by” for reasons that are not specified. Here again are photographs of the three suspects, not just Maxie now. An international brigade.
The female that Leonard once suspected could be an undiminished Nadia Emmerson has been identified as a mixed-race Filipina called Dorothy Paredes, known as Donut. In one photograph, she is still a pretty student with faculty colleagues at a Chinese restaurant. Christmas 2013. She’s smiling, just a little tipsy, with her arms around the shoulders of two pixelated men, one of whom is tugging at her ponytail of sleek black hair. A later photograph, released this morning by Interpol, shows a thinner woman with cuts and bruising to her lips and cheeks. Her jaw is swollen and her hair is cropped. The second man, an older, grizzled-looking Nicaraguan thought to be Donut’s lover, is Tony Ramirez, also known as Rafaelo Matamoros and, less convincingly, Pancho Mancha. Both are “wanted on four continents” and both are “unpredictable.”
There is also a picture of the hostages: another Christmas shot with a laden table, bottles, candles, and a turkey; four seated and delighted carnivores twisting to face the camera in the dining room of the hostage house ten months ago; and the slightly out-of-focus image of a half-crouching man who has evidently just arrived in the shot after setting up the camera on automatic delay. His mouth is hanging open breathlessly, not quite ready for the grin. The others are holding up their knives and forks in front of cheesy smiles: two boys of seven and nine years of age, their faces partly concealed; a middle-aged woman with heavy earrings—that day’s gift, perhaps—and thin sandy hair, scraped back beneath a paper hat; an older, white-haired woman whose wedding ring on her thin hand catches and reflects the camera flash.
Leonard punches his way between the various reports, hardly daring to speak other than to make a muttered comment at the screen, until he finds the information that they need, the latest word on Lucy Emmerson. The girl has simply disappeared, they say. Her disappearance was not planned: she has not packed a bag, taken any clothes or toiletries, or withdrawn her savings from the bank. Her tobacco pouch, her purse, and her cell phone have been discovered in her room. The police are in possession of a ransom note “with detailed threats” that links her kidnapping to events at the hostage house and to the suspect now unequivocally identified as Maxim Lermontov. The police do not specify what threats, but they are concerned for her safety. They do not say that she is Maxie’s daughter. They do say that raids are being carried out today on “suspect premises.”
“That’s us,” says Francine, almost pleased.
Finally, under the menu selection titled Mother’s Plea, Francine and Leonard find themselves observing a room crowded with journalists and film crews. Two senior policemen, a female community liaison officer, and Nadia Emmerson make their way across the screen to take their places behind a trestle table.
“It’s the mother,” Leonard says, though she is not the woman that he knew. How could she be? It’s eighteen years. What had he seen in her? he wonders. “My God, she’s changed. I’d walk right past her in the street.” But Francine shushes him and edges forward on the futon.
Nadia Emmerson looks dazed. Her face is stained and shiny, stressed and tight with tears and sleeplessness. The liaison officer nods and puts her hand on Nadia’s arm to a salvo of flashes from the cameras. Nadia’s shoulders drop to field a sob. Another salvo catches her. But still she finds enough courage and willpower to start reading her statement and her plea, not looking at the cameras but at the tabletop. “If you are watching this,” she says to Lucy’s kidnappers, “then please don’t think I do not understand why …” But then her throat clogs up with queuing sobs, and try as she might, for awkward moments she cannot summon the breath to continue. The words, written out in capitals on the paper in front of her, are beyond speech. In fact, she does not have the strength to stay a moment more. She stumbles out of the room, to a final, heartless fusillade of flash. The liaison officer has to carry on for her and read the paragraphs in her flat, measured voice, picking up exactly where Lucy’s mother left off: “Mrs. Emmerson says, ‘I do not understand why you have carried out this act. You hope it will stop violence in some way. But you have threatened violence yourself. Against my little girl. She’s only seventeen. I beg you, let my little girl come home.’”