The Longer the Thread Page 15

  “How can I sleep without knowing what’s happening to Harry?” Norma asked, running a hand through her hair. “How do you think they’re treating him?”

  Just then the telephone shrilled. Norma wheeled toward the table, but David Lippert came hurrying into the room. He snatched up the receiver.

  “Let me take it, Norma,” he said. “Hello? . . .”

  “Who is it? Is it Harry?”

  “. . . Yes. . . . Yes. . . . That’s something. . . . Yes, yes. . . . No, there’s nothing else. . . . Yeah, they say they’ll call. . . . Okay. . . . Thanks.”

  “Who is it?” Norma screamed at him. “Is it about Harry?”

  Lippert mopped his brow. “No, it wasn’t about Harry, Norma. I would have told you,” he said wearily. “It was Eric.”

  She stared at him.

  “He says he got a call from the freight forwarders. They did manage to get one shipment moved yesterday. Before the fire, that is.”

  With an affronted silence, she tore open a pack of cigarettes.

  David was almost dogged. “At least it’s some good news.”

  “Good news!” Norma said, fumbling with the matches. “What do you mean, good news? With Harry in the hands of some crazy killers? My God, David!”

  David frowned and flicked a beseeching look toward Elena Romero. “Norma . . .” he began.

  “Oh, leave me alone!” she said pettishly. “Go tell Cesar all about this great good news!”

  Moodily she stalked over to the window and started to pull back a curtain. Elena called out a warning. Outside the house, reporters and cameras were ringed like vultures, waiting to swoop. Any sign of life sparked them into action. All this intensified the garrison atmosphere inside the Lippert house.

  With an angular motion, Norma threw herself into a chair, deliberately looking past David. Only the ticking of the wall clock broke the silence.

  “We’ll be through in a few minutes,” David muttered, heading back to the study.

  An unpleasant twist of the lips was Norma’s only response.

  Amidst the other emotions of an emotion-filled day, Elena Romero felt sympathy for David Lippert. For once, he was meeting crisis like a man. Since the first shock, he had behaved well, keeping a firm grip on himself. It was David who decided that the children should go to the Romero home. It was David who dealt with the police, the Governor’s office, the FBI. It was David who composed and read a brief statement to the press. It was David who was doing what had to be done.

  “How can he?” Norma burst out. “How can he? He doesn’t care what’s happening to Harry!”

  “Of course he cares.” Elena was sharper than she meant to be. “We all care!”

  Norma dismissed this. “For all we know, he may be dead!” she wailed.

  “Norma, don’t torture yourself,” Elena said again. For how long had she been conducting this one-sided dialogue with Norma, going over the same ground again and again? “They won’t hurt Harry. This is just a move to get publicity.”

  She went on speaking, although she knew it was quite useless. Since this morning, Norma had retreated into a shell, inaccessible, beyond the reach of comfort or reassurance. Elena thought she understood why. Harry was more than Norma’s brother. He was the rock, representing stability and strength, on which his sister depended, perhaps more than she had ever realized. Fears for him—painfully real, painfully shattering—were only part of Norma’s distress. There was another element. With Harry in danger, Norma herself was threatened, her own life was turned upside down.

  She was retaliating in a frenzy, by lashing back—against her husband, against her friends, against anybody whose concern for Harry did not match her own. In this state, she did not approve David’s self-command, nor was she grateful for it. She resented it as indifference.

  David returned, with Cesar behind him. Cesar went directly to Norma’s side, reached down and, without a word, pressed her hand.

  Her eyes brimmed. “Oh, God, Cesar, I’m so frightened.”

  “I know,” he said softly. “But you must have courage. These students are not so dangerous, Norma. They have made a bold move—in order to get attention. But they will not harm Harry. You will see.”

  While he spoke, David was busying himself at the bar, reluctant to face Norma.

  “Brandy, Cesar?” he asked, from across the room. “Elena?”

  There was an uneasy pause while David provided drinks for the Romeros. Then, at last, he turned to the chair by the window. “Norma?” he asked. He did not sound like a husband to a stricken wife, but more like a wary trainer with a dangerous animal.

  But Norma was not clawing. “Maybe a little Scotch,” she said lifelessly. “Thanks, David.”

  She leaned back, closing her eyes. Nobody spoke. In part it was because everything had been said, and said again—what the Governor promised, what the police were doing, what the radicals wanted. But also, Elena realized, it was because they were all afraid of Norma.

  Moodily, David rose and went to the corner to switch on the television. Involuntarily Elena moved to stop him, but she was too late.

  “. . . no news of the missing Harry Zimmerman,” the newscaster was saying. “Searches of the dormitories at the university continue, and inquiries have been instigated in the Virgin Islands as well as the Dominican Republic. Elsewhere . . .”

  Abruptly Norma set down her glass, not noticing the liquid splashing over the rim.

  “You know what makes it worse,” she said drearily. “I can’t stop thinking that the last time I saw Harry, we had a fight. That’s terrible, isn’t it? After all Harry has done for us. To fight with him.”

  Cesar had not coped with Norma today as Elena had. He did not realize that consolation could not reach her. After a glance at David’s rigid face, he said, “You and Harry will laugh about it.”

  “Laugh?” she repeated blankly.

  Once again Cesar looked to David before he spoke. “It will all be something to laugh about, once Harry is back.”

  Stubbornly she did not hear him. “It’s a terrible thing. To fight with your own brother. And then to have this happen. My God, I’ll never forgive myself if . . . if . . .”

  Suddenly her husband’s silence infuriated her. “Don’t you care, David?” she raged. “Don’t you care that the last thing we did was fight with Harry? Doesn’t that bother you at all? Don’t you have any feelings at all?”

  He sounded defeated. “All I care about is getting Harry back. That’s what I feel right now, Norma.”

  She was poised on hysteria.

  “Nadal will release him,” Cesar said forcefully. “He is no fool. All he wants is publicity. He has it. He will release Harry.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” David replied quickly. “That’s what the Governor said when he called.”

  “It is only common sense.”

  Their byplay was lost on Norma. She sank back into her own thoughts. Then, as David was describing the official promises to relay information at any time of the day or night, she suddenly stiffened. Her face had gone white.

  “What if they don’t release Harry?” she asked in a terrified voice.

  “They will.”

  “But we were wrong about everything else!” she cried. “What if they don’t? What if they don’t?” Sinking her head into her arms, she broke into a paroxysm of sobbing.

  With a muttered oath, David rose and went to her side.

  “Leave me alone,” she cried, rocking back and forth. “Leave me alone!”

  David retreated a step and stood baffled. But the searing anguish in Norma’s voice drew him forward again. He slipped an arm around her shoulders.

  “No!” she screamed, trying to thrust him away. “Don’t touch me!”

  Instinctively he drew her into his embrace to soothe her wracked body. But Norma had abandoned every pretense of self-control. She pummeled his shoulders with clenched fists.

  “Oh, my God, what have we done to Harry? None of this was his f
ault. Why should he pay?” she gasped hoarsely.

  David’s hands had slipped down Norma’s arms to imprison her wrists. But she continued to struggle, writhing against him and throwing her head back to shriek:

  “Let me go! I’m going to find Harry, I’ll make them listen to me—I’ll tell everyone!”

  Across the room, Romero broke from his paralysis.

  “Elena,” he ordered brusquely, “get Dr. Salas—before anyone else hears her.”

  Chapter 16.

  Blind Stitching

  When John Thatcher arrived on Wall Street to be greeted by the news of the kidnapping, his first thoughts naturally were for the fate of Harry Zimmerman, the anguish of his family and the bewilderment of his colleagues at Slax. These concerns were shared by the callers who monopolized Thatcher’s telephone for the rest of the day.

  Pete Olmsted, on the long-distance line, spoke for the shocked American community in San Juan.

  “My God, it’s so senseless,” he said over and over again.

  When Thatcher asked about official action, Olmsted said that the Governor seemed to be determined and efficient. Police were combing known hideouts of the Radical Independents. Several students were already in custody. But Harry Zimmerman and Prudencio Nadal might have disappeared from the face of the earth.

  Annie Galiano rang through later in the afternoon. Her normal liveliness had been muted by distress.

  “Poor, poor Harry,” she said sadly.

  As she went on, Thatcher recalled that she and Harry Zimmerman had known each other, worked together and lived through the ups and downs of the garment trade for almost twenty years. She was not responding to a social outrage; she was worrying about the danger threatening a particular individual. Furthermore, her instinct for vigorous action was frustrated. What could she do? What could anyone do? On hearing the news, she had ordered the ILGWU in San Juan to denounce the kidnapping.

  “And a fat lot of good that will do,” she commented. “Every organization in Puerto Rico is issuing some kind of statement. I never would have believed that Nadal kid would pull anything like this. It’ll boomerang so hard it will finish him.”

  “I thought you didn’t have a high opinion of Nadal,” Thatcher reminded her.

  “I said he was wet behind the ears,” she said grumpily. “Not that he was crazy.”

  Thatcher believed in facing facts, however unpalatable. “Ramírez claims Prudencio Nadal was the one behind the trouble at the university last year. If he started his career by gunning down the police, he doesn’t have such a long way to go before he reaches kidnapping.”

  “That’s different. Riots are so confusing that you get a confused public reaction. This is cut and dried.” She was silent for a moment, before continuing thoughtfully. “Even so, I never heard that Nadal organized the riot. I thought he was just one of the kids who joined in. I’d better look into that.”

  Thatcher did not see what good this would do, other than provide distracting occupation. He avoided any remark, instead promising to pass on any information from Hato Rey as soon as it came in. With renewed expressions of sympathy, he hung up.

  Dudley Humble called just before Thatcher left for the day. He had nothing further to report other than that Olmsted was presently closeted with the police, answering questions about Zimmerman’s last known movements.

  It was just as well that John Thatcher’s Tuesday had been dominated by people genuinely concerned with the fate of Harry Zimmerman. On Wednesday, it was brought home to him that certain interests at the Sloan viewed the outrage in terms of their own parochial interests. This was not surprising. No one in International had met Zimmerman, and San Juan was a long way away.

  Thatcher, when he emplaned for New York, had not expected to escape the problem which had been responsible for his journey. The dispute between Commercial Credit and International was still unresolved. He had avoided making a hard and fast decision. And what had happened in the interim? Murder, arson and kidnapping—that’s what. It was too much to hope that Innes, and his cohorts in International, would not see a powerful object lesson in this sequence. They would strike while the iron was hot. There would be conferences and memoranda and research reports. There would be preternaturally intelligent displays of hindsight. There would be reproaches made more in sorrow than in anger.

  So much for anticipation. The conferences, memoranda and reports all duly materialized. But so did something else. Innes, flailing his subordinates into prodigies of effort, had achieved a result he was the first to regret. The tidal wave fomented by his tactics had flowed past the sixth, seventh and eighth floors of the Sloan—which was all he had in mind—to wash over the executive tower. There a returned traveler was just checking in. So the tide, receding from its high-water mark, had casually dumped Bradford Withers, president of the Sloan, at the head of the conference table. He was prepared to bring to bear on the problem at hand all the resources of his intellect.

  Withers’ two outstanding characteristics were a commitment to perpetual globe-trotting and a massive indifference to financial matters. Normally the first defect canceled the second. When affairs at the Sloan became sufficiently critical to require front-office intervention, Brad was usually in some far-flung corner of the world. Today, alas, he was not. In addition, he felt he had special expertise to contribute to the proceedings.

  “Now, John,” he said chattily, “I’ve been reading this report about Puerto Rico and you’d be surprised at what’s going on there. Why, they’ve kidnapped one of our customers! I don’t think we should encourage that sort of thing.”

  To a man, his subordinates agreed.

  “I can’t imagine what’s gotten into them,” Brad continued. “Now, I haven’t been there for a year or two, but I remember everybody was very pleasant. No one tried to kidnap me.”

  John Thatcher normally did not speak at meetings unless he had something to say. But the yearning silence which engulfed the table—as of men who look on the promised land—propelled him into action.

  “I think, Brad, it’s generally agreed that only a minority of the independence supporters are involved in these crimes. None of our other customers have had any trouble. Or anybody else’s customers, for that matter. For some reason, the radicalistas have been concentrating on Slax.”

  “The radicalistas?” Then Withers’ expression of chronic bewilderment cleared. He beamed with innocent pleasure. “So that’s what they call their radicals, is it? Have I ever told you that I’ve picked up quite a bit of Spanish here and there, John? I expect Innes has, too. It’ll be a big help to him, running things down there.”

  John Thatcher was too experienced in handling his superior to be surprised that Withers should toss off the very decision they were supposed to be deliberating.

  “I’m glad you brought that up, Brad,” he said firmly. “As a matter of fact, Pete Olmsted’s operation has been making investments on the island.” To guard against any request for further identification, he hurried on. “Commercial Credit and International have both been active in Puerto Rico. It’s been suggested we consolidate our business there in one division. Innes takes the view that International should be in charge.”

  He was reaching for Walter Bowman’s report to find a simple synopsis of the opposition viewpoint when Withers broke in.

  “And I suppose Commercial Credit wants to stay down on those beaches,” he chuckled genially. “But seriously, now, you can’t deny that the only way to understand a country is to spend a lot of time there. And Innes has spent more time in Latin America than anyone else we have.”

  Innes was anything but gratified by this tribute. He knew what everyone at the table was thinking. Bradford Withers was walking proof, if any were needed, that it takes more than extended sojourns in foreign parts to perceive foreign problems. Withers, after all, had managed to spend considerable time on Wall Street while remaining splendidly immune from the slightest interest in American business. The delegation from International
hastened to put its case on steadier foundations.

  “Of course, our men are familiar with the languages and social customs prevailing in the Latin-American area. In addition to that, however, they are kept abreast of the current political and economic conditions. Stuart, here, will bear me out.”

  A small sandy-haired man snatched up a list and began to intone. If he were to be believed, International had predicted every turn of events that had surprised our neighbors south of the border in the last decade. They knew about that sugar-crop failure before Fidel Castro; they had given the Chilean election to Allende before the networks in Santiago had begun totting up; they had plotted Che Guevara’s course before the Bolivian Army ever heard his name. No nationalization, no coup d’état, no devaluation had caught them unaware.

  Stuart’s audience was not markedly impressed by his recitation. John Thatcher, for one, knew too much about International’s habit of hedging its bets. They could just as easily have produced confirmation of their omniscience if Guevara were President of Bolivia and Cuba glutted with sugar. Brad Withers was frankly restive. When he was lured down from the tower to attend a meeting, he did not care for tiresome historical detail. He wanted a nice, cozy talk about where the best scuba diving was and which yacht broker was reliable. As for the alert, terrierlike man from Commercial Credit, he was straining at the leash. Barely had the last encomium to International’s foresight been presented when he seized the floor.

  “That is certainly interesting, Stuart,” he said insincerely, “and a remarkable testimony to International’s efficiency. But I think we may be losing sight of essentials. The reason you have to know about conditions in Argentina before you do business in Argentina is because they affect your market—export restrictions, credit policies, socialization, all the rest. But the garment industry in Puerto Rico is part of the American market and—”

  “So that’s what they’re doing down there.” Brad Withers was pleased to know.

  Quite rightly, the terrier ignored this interruption and forged ahead. “And the American garment industry is in the throes of upheaval. The introduction of the new double-knitting machines and the development of the polyester synthetics has revolutionized . . .”