Enough Rope Read online

  “Why should I require restraint? We are both professionals, after all. I’ll cooperate.”

  “That simplifies things.”

  Anselmo extended his arm. The younger man took him by the wrist while the other one readied the needle. “This won’t do you any good either,” Anselmo said conversationally. “I’ve had pentothal before. It’s not effective on me.”

  “We’ll have to establish that for ourselves.”

  “As you will.”

  “At least you’ll get a pleasant nap out of it.”

  “I never have trouble sleeping,” Anselmo said. “I sleep like a baby.”

  He didn’t fight the drug but went with the flow as it circulated in his bloodstream. His consciousness went off to the side somewhere. There was orchestral music interwoven with a thunderstorm. The bolts of lightning, vivid against an indigo background, were extraordinarily beautiful.

  Then he was awake, aware of his surroundings, aware that the two men were speaking but unable to make sense of their conversation. When full acuity returned he gave no sign of it at first, hoping to overhear something of importance, but their conversation held nothing of interest to him. After a few minutes he stirred himself and opened his eyes.

  “Well?” he demanded. “Did I tell you any vital secrets?”

  The older one shook his head.

  “I told you as much.”

  “So you did. You’ll forgive our not taking your word, I hope.”

  Anselmo laughed aloud. “You have humor, old one. It’s almost a pity we’re enemies. Tell me your name.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “Nahum Grodin.”

  Anselmo repeated the name aloud. “When you captured me,” he said. “In that filthy Arab town.”

  “Al-dhareesh.”

  “Al-dhareesh. Yes. When I surrendered, you know, I thought for a long moment that you were going to gun me down. That wind that blew endlessly, and the moon glinting off your pistol, and something in the air. Something in the way you were standing. I thought you were going to shoot me.”

  “I very nearly did.”

  “Yes, so I thought.” Anselmo laughed suddenly. “And now you must wish that you did, eh? Hesitation, that’s what kills men, Grodin. Better the wrong choice than no choice at all. You should have shot me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Next time you’ll know better, Grodin.”

  “Next time?”

  “Oh, there will be a next time for us, old one. And next time you won’t hesitate to fire, but then next time I’ll know better than to surrender. Eh?”

  “I almost shot you.”

  “I sensed it.”

  “Like a dog.”

  “A dog?” Anselmo thought of the dogs in the Arab town, the one he’d disturbed when he opened the door, the whining one he’d killed. His hand remembered the feel of the animal’s skull and the brief tremor that passed through the beast when the long knife went home. It was difficult now to recall just why he had knifed the dog. He supposed he must have done it to prevent the animal’s whimpering from drawing attention, but was that really the reason? The act itself had been so reflexive that one could scarcely determine its motive.

  As if it mattered.

  Outside, the sunlight was blinding. Gershon Meir took a pair of sunglasses from his breast pocket and put them on. Nahum Grodin squinted against the light. He never wore sunglasses and didn’t mind the glare. And the sun warmed his bones, eased the ache in his joints.

  “The day after tomorrow,” Gershon Meir said. “I’ll be glad to see the last of him.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes. I hate having to release him but sometimes I think I hate speaking with him even more.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  They walked through the streets in a comfortable silence. After a few blocks the younger man said, “I had the oddest feeling earlier. Just for a moment.”

  “Oh?”

  “When you gave him the pentothal. For an instant I was afraid you were going to kill him.”

  “With pentothal?”

  “I thought you might inject an air bubble into a vein. Anything along those lines. It would have been easy enough.”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know that I’d be able to find a vein that easily, actually. I’m hardly a doctor. A subcutaneous injection of pentothal, that’s within my capabilities, but I might not be so good at squirting air into a vein. But do you think for a moment I’d be mad enough to kill him?”

  “It was a feeling, not a thought.”

  “I’d delight in killing him,” Grodin said. “But I’d hate to wipe out New York in the process.”

  “They might not detonate the bomb just for Anselmo. They want to get the other prisoners out, and they want their other demands. If you told them Anselmo had died a natural death they might swallow it and pretend to believe it.”

  “You think we should call their bluff that way?”

  “No. They’re lunatics. Who knows what they might do?”

  “Exactly,” Grodin said.

  “It was just a feeling, that’s all.”

  And a little further on: “Nahum? It’s a curious thing. When you and Anselmo talk I might as well not be in the room.”

  “I don’t take your meaning, Gershon.”

  “There’s a current that runs between the two of you. I feel utterly excluded from the company. The two of you, you seem to understand each other.”

  “That’s interesting. You think I understand Anselmo? I don’t begin to understand him. You know, I didn’t expect to gain any real information from him while he was under the pentothal. But I did hope to get some insight into what motivated the man. And he gave me nothing. He likes to see blood spill, he likes loud noises. You know what Bakunin said?”

  “I don’t even know who Bakunin was. A Russian?”

  “A Russian. ‘The urge to destroy is a creative urge,’ that’s what he said. Perhaps the context in which he said it mitigates the line somewhat. I wouldn’t know. Anselmo is an embodiment of that philosophy. He only wishes to destroy. No. Gershon, I do not understand him.”

  “But there is a sympathy between the two of you. I’m not putting it well, I know, but there is something.”

  Grodin did not reply immediately. Finally he said, “The man says we’ll meet again. He’s wrong.”

  Yet they might have met again on the day that Anselmo was released. Grodin and his assistant were on hand. They watched from a distance while the terrorist was escorted from his cell to an armored car for transport to the Syrian lines, and Grodin had been assigned to oversee security procedures lest some zealot shoot Anselmo down as he emerged from the prison. They followed the armored car in a vehicle of their own, Meir driving, Grodin at his side. The ceremony at the Syrian border, by means of which custody of Anselmo was transferred from his Israeli guards to a group of Palestinian commandos, was indescribably tense; nevertheless it was concluded without a hitch.

  Just before he entered the waiting car, Anselmo turned for a last look across the border. His eyes darted around as if seeking a specific target. Then he thrust out his jaw and drew back his lips, baring his jagged teeth in a final hideous smile. He gave his head a toss and ducked down into the car. The door swung shut. Moments later the car sped toward Damascus.

  “Quite a performance,” Gershon Meir said.

  “He’s an actor. Everything is performance for him. His whole life is theater.”

  “He was looking for you.”

  “I think not.”

  “He was looking for someone. For whom else would he look?”

  Grodin gave his head an impatient shake. His assistant looked as though he would have liked to continue the conversation, but recognized the gesture and let it drop.

  On the long drive back Nahum Grodin leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. It seemed to him that he dreamed without quite losing consciousness. After perhaps half an hour he opened his blue
eyes and straightened up in his seat.

  “Where is he now?” he wondered aloud. “Damascus? Or is his plane already in the air?”

  “I’d guess he’s still on the ground.”

  “No matter. How do you feel, Gershon? Letting such a one out of our hands? Forget revenge. Think of the ability he has to work with disparate groups of lunatics. He takes partisans of one mad cause and puts them to work on behalf of another equally insane movement. He coordinates the actions of extremists who have nothing else in common. And his touch is like nobody else’s. This latest devilment at the United Nations—it is almost impossible to believe that someone other than Anselmo planned it. In fact I would not be surprised to learn that he had hatched the concept some time ago to be held at the ready in the event that he should ever be captured.”

  “I wonder if that could be true.”

  “It’s not impossible, is it? And we had to let him go.”

  “We’ll never have to do that again.”

  “No,” Grodin agreed. “One good thing’s come of this. The new law is not perfect, God knows. Instant trials and speedy hangings are not what democracies ought to aspire to. But it is comforting to know that we will not be in this position again. Gershon?”

  “Yes?”

  “Stop the car, please. Pull off on the shoulder.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No. But there is something I’ve decided to tell you. Good, and turn off the engine. We’ll be here a few moments.” Grodin squeezed his eyes shut, put his hand to his forehead. Without opening his eyes he said, “Anselmo said he and I would meet again. I told you the other day that he was wrong.”

  “I remember.”

  “He’ll never return to Israel, you see. He’ll meet his friends, if one calls such people friends, and he’ll go wherever he has it in mind to go. And in two weeks or a month or possibly as much as two months he will experience a certain amount of nervousness. He may be mentally depressed, he may grow anxious and irritable. It’s quite possible that he’ll pay no attention to these signs because they may not be very much out of the ordinary. His life is disorganized, chaotic, enervating, so this state I’ve discussed may be no departure from the normal course of things.”

  “I don’t understand, Nahum.”

  “Then after a day or so these symptoms will be more pronounced,” Grodin went on. “He may run a fever. His appetite will wane. He’ll grow quite nervous. He may talk a great deal, might even become something of a chatterbox. You recall that he said he sleeps like a baby. Well, he may experience insomnia.

  “Then after a couple of days things will take a turn for the worse.” Grodin took a pinseal billfold from his pocket, drew out an unfolded sheet of paper. “Here’s a description from a medical encyclopedia. ‘The agitation of the sufferer now becomes greatly increased and the countenance now exhibits anxiety and terror. There is marked embarrassment of the breathing, but the most striking and terrible features of this stage are the effects produced by attempts to swallow fluids. The patient suffers from thirst and desires eagerly to drink, but on making the effort is seized with a violent suffocative paroxysm which continues for several seconds and is succeeded by a feeling of intense alarm and distress. Indeed the very thought of drinking suffices to bring on a choking paroxysm, as does also the sound of running water.

  “ ‘The patient is extremely sensitive to any kind of external impression—a bright light, a loud noise, a breath of cool air—anything of this sort may bring on a seizure. There also occur general convulsions and occasionally a condition of tetanic spasm. These various paroxysms increase in frequency and severity with the advance of the disease.’ “

  “Disease?” Gershon Meir frowned. “I don’t understand, Nahum. What disease? What are you driving at?”

  Grodin went on reading. “ ‘The individual experiences alternate intervals of comparative quiet in which there is intense anxiety and more or less constant difficulty in respiration accompanied by a peculiar sonorous exhalation which has suggested the notion that the patient barks like a dog. In many instances—‘ “

  “A dog!”

  “ ‘In many instances there are intermittent fits of maniacal excitement. During all this stage of the disease the patient is tormented with a viscid secretion accumulating in his mouth. From dread of swallowing this he constantly spits about himself. He may also make snapping movements of the jaws as if attempting to bite. These are actually a manifestation of the spasmodic action which affects the muscles in general. There is no great amount of fever, but the patient will be constipated, his flow of urine will be diminished, and he will often feel sexual excitement.

  “ ‘After two or three days of suffering of the most terrible description the patient succumbs, with death taking place either in a paroxysm of choking or from exhaustion. The duration of the disease from the first declaration of symptoms is generally from three to five days.’ “

  Grodin refolded the paper, returned it to his wallet. “Rabies,” he said quietly. “Hydrophobia. Its incubation period is less than a week in dogs and other lower mammals. In humans it generally takes a month to erupt. It works faster in small children, I understand. And if the bite is in the head or neck the incubation period is speeded up.”

  “Can’t it be cured? I thought—”

  “The Pasteur shots. A series of about a dozen painful injections. I believe the vaccine is introduced by a needle into the stomach. And there are other less arduous methods of vaccination if the particular strain of rabies virus can be determined. But they have to be employed immediately. Once the incubation period is complete, once the symptoms manifest themselves, then death is inevitable.”

  “God.”

  “By the time Anselmo has the slightest idea what’s wrong with him—”

  “It will be too late.”

  “Exactly,” Grodin said.

  “When you gave him the pentothal—”

  “Yes. There was more than pentothal in the needle.”

  “I sensed something.”

  “So you said.”

  “But I never would have guessed—”

  “No. Of course not.”

  Gershon Meir shuddered. “When he realizes what you did to him and how you did it—”

  “Then what?” Grodin spread his hands. “Could he be more utterly our enemy than he is already? And I honestly don’t think he’ll guess how he was tricked. He’ll most likely suppose he was exposed to rabies from an animal source. I understand you can get it from inhaling the vapors of the dung of rabid bats. Perhaps he’ll hide out in a bat-infested cave and blame the bats for his illness. But it doesn’t matter, Gershon. Let him know what I did to him. I almost hope he guesses, for all the good it will do him.”

  “God.”

  “I just wanted to tell you,” Grodin said, his voice calmer now. “There’s poetry to it, don’t you think? He’s walking around now like a time bomb. He could get the Pasteur shots and save himself, but he doesn’t know that, and by the time he does—”

  “God.”

  “Start the car, eh? We’d better be getting back.” And the older man straightened up in his seat and rubbed the throbbing knuckles of his right hand. They ached, but all the same he was smiling.

  The Most Unusual Snatch

  They grabbed Carole Butler a few minutes before midnight just a block and a half from her own front door. It never would have happened if her father had let her take the car. But she was six months shy of eighteen, and the law said you had to be eighteen to drive at night, and her father was a great believer in the law. So she had taken the bus, got off two blocks from her house, and walked half a block before a tall thin man with his hat down over his eyes appeared suddenly and asked her the time.

  She was about to tell him to go buy his own watch when an arm came around her from behind and a damp cloth fastened over her mouth and nose. It smelled like a hospital room.

  She heard voices, faintly, as if from far away. “Not too long, you don’t
want to kill her.”

  “What’s the difference? Kill her now or kill her later, she’s just as dead.”

  “You kill her now and she can’t make the phone call.”

  There was more, but she didn’t hear it. The chloroform did its work and she sagged, limp, unconscious.

  At first, when she came to, groggy and weak and sick to her stomach, she thought she had been taken to a hospital. Then she realized it was just the smell of the chloroform. Her head seemed awash in the stuff. She breathed steadily, in and out, in and out, stayed where she was, and didn’t open her eyes.

  She heard the same two voices she had heard before. One was assuring the other that everything would go right on schedule, that they couldn’t miss. “Seventy-five thou,” he said several times. “Wait another hour, let him sweat a little. Then call him and tell him it’ll cost him seventy-five thou to see his darling daughter again. That’s all we tell him, just that we got her, and the price. Then we let him stew in it for another two hours.”

  “Why drag it out?”

  “Because it has to drag until morning anyway. He’s not going to have that kind of bread around the house. He’ll have to go on the send for it, and that means nine o’clock when the banks open. Give him the whole message right away and he’ll have too much time to get nervous and call copper. But space it out just right and we’ll have him on the string until morning, and then he can go straight to the bank and get the money ready.”

  Carole opened her eyes slowly, carefully. The one who was doing most of the talking was the same tall thin man who had asked her the time. He was less than beautiful, she noticed. His nose was lopsided, angling off to the left as though it had been broken and improperly reset. His chin was scarcely there at all. He ought to wear a goatee, she thought. He would still be no thing of beauty, but it might help.

  The other one was shorter, heavier, and younger, no more than ten years older than Carole. He had wide shoulders, close-set eyes, and a generally stupid face, but he wasn’t altogether bad-looking. Not bad at all she told herself. Between the two of them, they seemed to have kidnapped her. She wanted to laugh out loud.