Paris Ransom Read online

  “That word’s not actually profane, General. It’s scatological, but profanity wouldn’t be uncalled for.”

  “Well whatever, I am sorry. It was an oversight. My apologies.”

  “Apologies don’t really help all that much. But let’s move on. Did Pandy say why she hasn’t returned my many phone messages? I’ve been calling her twice a day. It kind of pisses me off that she was happy to talk to the NYPD and you but not to me.”

  “She said her mother has been very ill, and she’s been visiting her in Alabama, so she hasn’t been checking messages. She just got back to New York last night.”

  “Well, what did she say about the finger?” I asked.

  “We sent her several photos of it, but she wasn’t sure it was his. She said if it had been a left ring finger, she would have been able to tell because it would have a white mark where his wedding ring is. She looked but couldn’t find any photos that showed his hands.”

  “What about DNA?”

  “She doesn’t seem to have anything likely to have DNA on it. She said Oscar took his toothbrush and his comb and hairbrush with him, and she washed all his dirty clothes and all of their sheets after he left.”

  “Why don’t you send an expert to their apartment in New York to look for his DNA?” Jenna asked. “It’s got to be on something there.”

  For the first time, the general looked uncomfortable. “We do not have an unlimited budget. We have instead asked the NYPD to have one of their people swab the apartment for DNA, but they are backlogged with very important things, so it will take a while.”

  I could tell that there was a head of steam building beneath Jenna’s skull, and it was only a question of when it might blow through. “Isn’t this important, General? After all, a man has been kidnapped off the street!”

  “Frankly, Jenna, it’s only of medium importance. There are kidnappings in France every year, to be sure, but there are also other major crimes that must be investigated. This kidnapping would be of higher importance if we could link it to a large money laundering operation or terrorism.”

  “But you can’t.”

  “We’re trying. One hundred thousand dollars in cash doesn’t disappear without a trace. We are looking for that money.”

  “But you’re not looking so hard for Oscar.” “We believe that when we find where that money went, we will quickly be able to find Oscar.”

  There was a small silence in the room as Jenna and I came to understand that what we regarded as top priority, the general and his team regarded as something lesser.

  I broke the silence and said, “Don’t you even care that a man’s finger has been cut off? Even if he weren’t my friend, I’d think it ought to be a matter of a lot higher priority. I’m worried he’s going to be killed while you guys screw around with this.”

  “It is a high priority, and of course we care. But whoever it was whose finger was cut off, it’s already off. It is the fact that they sent a finger that’s important, not finding out if this finger is really Oscar’s. But I agree that either way, it is a tactic of barbarians. Who are probably not French.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell us?” I asked.

  “Not very much. We have still not found the car in which he was driven away.”

  “You still refuse to use the word ‘kidnapped,’ don’t you?”

  “Yes, based on what we know, whatever it is now, this was not likely a kidnapping when it started.”

  “Then why did whoever drove him away send the finger and the note?”

  “It is no doubt some falling out among thieves. But in a long career, I have never heard of a kidnapper asking for a book to pay a ransom. Money can be spent anywhere. The book will be useless to them because we will eventually publicize this.”

  “Maybe someone just really wants the book,” Jenna said. “A collector, for example.”

  “Maybe.”

  I could tell that we were starting to waste our time. I stood up and said, “Thank you, General, for coming by to brief us.”

  “You are welcome.”

  But Jenna wasn’t ready to let it drop. “There’s gotta be some way, General, for us to find him without figuring out first where the money went,” she said.

  “Jenna, I will tell you what I told Robert. Do not try to find him yourself. It is very dangerous.”

  Jenna said nothing in response.

  Finally, we all said au revoir and the general left. I noticed that he didn’t use any form of “see you later.” All he said was “bonne journée.” Have a good day. Maybe he had just blown us off.

  I looked at Jenna. “He’s probably right that what we’re doing is dangerous.”

  “So what? Wouldn’t Oscar come look for us, danger or no danger? Can you imagine him giving up? I can’t.”

  “No, I can’t, and I’m not backing out. But Oscar would be the first one to say that if we get killed in the process, it won’t do him a bit of good.”

  “Robert, the longer he’s missing, the more likely it is that he’s going to be found dead. We need to continue looking for him, just like we’ve been doing.”

  “I want to find him as badly you do. But we need a better plan, so let’s get to making one instead of arguing about who cares the most, okay?”

  I thought to myself, as I said it, that Jenna and I had had this problem during all the years we practiced law together back in LA. She was always the jackrabbit, racing ahead, and I was usually the tortoise, equally committed but slower and more cautious. Usually, the combination worked out well. I hoped it would here, too.

  CHAPTER 14

  After an hour’s intense discussion, we had failed to come up with a plan that was much more developed than our original plan to find either Oscar’s hotel or where he bought the book. We simply added to it a third idea: find the book itself, which we assumed must be somewhere in Paris. The only problem was that, despite the urgency and our growing anxiety about Oscar’s fate, we had no idea how to do any of it.

  “You know, we are ignoring the most obvious strategy,” Jenna said.

  “Which is?”

  “We should respond to the note in the box by texting that number and telling them that we don’t have the book, but if they give us some hints about where to look we’ll help them find it.”

  “That makes no sense at all, Jenna. If we do that they’ll just pressure Oscar more to give them those hints.”

  “They’re already pressuring him. They cut off his finger.”

  “If it is really his finger.”

  “Listen, I’m not pulling this strategy out of my butt. I went on the Net last night and read up on how to negotiate with kidnappers. And it said that the most important thing to do is to start talking to them, even if you can’t give them what they want, or at least can’t give it to them right away.”

  “What do you mean by ‘it said’?”

  “I mean that most of the articles I found say that that’s the thing to do.”

  “But there are other articles that say it’s the wrong thing to do, isn’t that correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do those other articles think the right approach is?”

  “They say not responding is the best strategy because most kidnappers have decided in advance whether to kill the person or let him go. And that it has nothing to do with what you say or whether they get the ransom.”

  “Well, if you don’t speak to them, don’t you just speed up the killing of their victim?”

  “The theory goes that if the kidnappers were going to let their victim go, they let them go sooner when they see that they’re not going to get the ransom they want. And if the kidnappers were going to kill the victim no matter what, they’ll just do it sooner, so it’ll all be gotten over with, with minimum bother to the victim and to you.”

  “Jenna, candidly
, that seems to me like the kind of heartless, logical approach the old Jenna would’ve preferred.”

  “In a way it still is, but there are other considerations.”

  “Such as?”

  “If you don’t talk to the kidnappers, and they end up killing the victim, you’ll never know if they wouldn’t have done it if you had talked to them. And the result is you will never forgive yourself.”

  “So you want to talk to them.”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about it for a few seconds. The whole thing about not talking to the kidnappers seemed like the kind of high-flown strategy that a government would employ. If the strategy killed someone, there was always a next time to try to make it work. We were just two people with one close friend we wanted to save. There wouldn’t be a next time. Back in the day, when I had to deal all the time with people on the other side of my litigations—some of whom were impossible jerks or worse—it almost always made things better to just call them up.

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  We then spent half an hour trying to come up with the perfect text to send the kidnappers. In the end, we crafted something on the theory, as the old Shaker hymn puts it, “tis the gift to be simple”:

  We don’t have the book.

  We don’t know where it is.

  Help us find it for you.

  As I drafted it, I wondered why Oscar just didn’t tell them himself where the book was so he could be released. In a sense, he held his own ransom in his hands. Now the answer to that question was a puzzle. Was the book and its sale his retirement? Even if it were, would that be worth his life? I didn’t really know anything about his finances or his psychological state, so it was at least possible. Another explanation was that Oscar himself didn’t know where the book was.

  We sent it off and waited. Perhaps an hour went by. I read a book. Jenna folded sheets of paper into smaller and smaller halves, as small as she could manage, and tossed each one into the wastepaper basket. Jenna is a poster child for OCD.

  The phone rang with a large jangle. We both jumped.

  “It’s them!” Jenna said, and ran to grab it. She picked it up, listened for a second and said, “It’s the general. He wants me to put him on the speakerphone.”

  She did, and the general’s voice came through loud and clear. “I see you’re not going to follow my advice.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “I’m talking about your sending a text message to the people who drove Oscar away. I thought I told you not to do that.”

  “No, you advised us not to do it. But since you guys are apparently putting this on the back burner, we’re going to find him ourselves.”

  “We are not putting it on a burner in the back. Our burner is very hot. It is just on a different part of the stove.”

  I decided I wasn’t going to get into the geography of burners. “How did you even find out we sent a message?”

  “We’ve been monitoring that cell number ever since you gave us that note.”

  “So you read what we wrote in our text?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “An invasion of our privacy.”

  “Permitted in this circumstance, without question. If you don’t want us to read your texts to the kidnappers, stop sending them.”

  “We won’t.”

  “Well then, do keep us posted,” he said, in a rather clipped tone.

  “So you’re not angry at us?”

  “Angry? Why should I be angry? He is your friend, and if you want to do something stupid in order to try to find him, I can only hope you will not find him dead. Or get yourselves killed, too.”

  I started to say something but realized he was no longer there.

  “So, I guess they’re not very happy with us,” Jenna said.

  “Apparently not. But what he said doesn’t make sense. If the general’s strategy is to avoid contact with the kidnappers because they’ve already decided what they’re going to do anyway—kill Oscar or let him go—and we can’t change their minds, why would communicating with them make any difference?”

  “All I said, Robert, was that that was one theory discussed on the Internet. We really don’t know why these French cops don’t want us to communicate. They never said. But I’ve got a feeling that something else is going on here besides a disagreement over negotiating theory.”

  “You could be right, Jenna. If you are, we need to think about next steps.”

  “Any ideas? I mean, we haven’t thought of any way to find either his hotel or the book.”

  I actually slapped my forehead with the palm of my hand. “God, there’s something we haven’t thought about and it’s so obvious.”

  “What?”

  “Oscar is a US citizen. We can ask the US embassy to help us find him. And they probably have access to great technology to trace text messages and where they’re coming from. And unlike the French, they’ll actually care about him.”

  No sooner had I said it than Jenna was on her laptop searching the US embassy site. After a few minutes she said, “There’s good news and there’s bad news.”

  “Do you want to tell me even though this place may be bugged, Jenna?”

  “I don’t think I care if they hear this.”

  “Okay, hit me with the good news first.”

  “There’s an entire page on their website called ‘US Citizens Missing Abroad.’ And it says that they can check places like hospitals and prisons and will also check with local authorities.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “There’s something called the Privacy Act. Because of that, they may not be able to share what they learn with us. But there’s a loophole. It goes on to say that exceptions can be made for the health and safety of the individual.”

  “Well, if this isn’t a health and safety issue for Oscar, I don’t know what is,” I said. “Let’s go see them.”

  “Should we call first?”

  “No. If the general and his friends can read our texts, they probably have enough sophistication to eavesdrop on our ordinary phone calls, too. Let’s just go there.”

  We did, but on the way we stopped at a self-serve kiosk and bought two throw-away phones, one for me and one for Jenna. After that, we took the metro, which is almost always the fastest way to get around Paris. On the way, huddled in a corner of the subway car where we hoped we wouldn’t be overhead, we talked about how much we should tell the embassy about the investigation already under way by the French. We decided to tell them about it, but to disparage it as ineffective. We were going to be talking to Americans, right? They’d be inclined, we hoped, to believe it about the French.

  Thirty minutes later we emerged onto the east side of the place de la Concorde, the twenty-acre plaza in the heart of Paris, with its soaring, gold-tipped Egyptian obelisk smack in the middle. From there, it was only a two-minute walk to the US embassy, which is at an angle across from the Tuileries Garden, set behind tall trees.

  In my many visits to the consular section of the embassy, back in the seventies, when I had first been in Paris and was trying to get a lost passport replaced, I had been able to walk past the marine guards and into the consulate to state my business and be directed to the right person. The guards had seemed almost ceremonial.

  The events of 9/11 had changed all of that. The entire complex was now set behind large concrete bollards, and we didn’t even get as far as the marines. Instead, we walked up to a uniformed policeman standing under a square green tent set on tall aluminum poles. We told him we were there to report a missing US citizen, and he politely told us, in grammatically perfect but heavily accented English, that we could not get into the consular waiting room unless our names were on the daily access list. He started to look at the list, and I told him that he needn’t bother because our names were not th
ere.

  “Well, then, sir, I’m afraid you won’t be able to get in today.”

  In saying it, he looked almost as pleased with himself as I imagined Tess’s concierge, Pierre, would be to deny me total access to her building.

  “But it’s important. A man is missing—kidnapped—and every minute counts.”

  “Did this happen today?”

  “No. Several days ago.”

  “Well, if every minute counts . . . eh, never mind, I am just a policeman, and my job is not to comment, but to not let you in unless you’re on the list.”

  “What should we do to get on the list?”

  “I suggest you call the consulate and make an appointment. And you should also call the police.” He handed me a card with the number on it and waved us away so that the next people in line could approach. We headed into the Tuileries Garden and found a café. Once seated, and using the first of my throw-away phones, I called the consulate and was immediately greeted by a phone tree. After climbing through the tree, I finally found a twig on which I could leave an “emergency” message. I decided to be direct and say that I was calling about the kidnapping of an American citizen, and left my cell number.

  Then we ordered coffee and waited. To my surprise, my cell rang no more than ten minutes later. The caller identified herself as “Helen Klarner” from the consular section of the embassy. At first, when I told her that we had witnessed the kidnapping, she seemed sympathetic and anxious to help.

  She first asked for Oscar’s full name and his birthdate. Fortunately, I had attended his 65th birthday party not long before, and I was able to remember the day and month and work backward to the year. It seemed to be going well.

  As the conversation went on, however, and I admitted that the event had taken place a couple of days ago, that we were already working with the French police—but unhappy with their progress—and that we were not related to Oscar, who had a wife in New York, her enthusiasm to help seemed to cool.

  Finally, she said, “Look, I doubt I’m going to be able to help you very much with this. I will make some inquiries of my contacts at the French police and perhaps at the Foreign Ministry, but I doubt I will learn very much that you don’t already know.”