Текст книги "Target Manhattan"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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Eastlake (Cont’d)

But you finally got through to the Federal Reserve Director in Washington, didn’t you?

Yes. It took some doing. My secretary tracked him down. He was over at Treasury, having lunch with somebody. We finally patched through a line to him.

At what time?

Must have been about one thirty, one forty.

What was said in that conversation?

I spelled out the situation. He absorbed it as quickly as you could expect, but a thing like that takes some getting used to. He asked me a lot of questions. I only had answers to a few of them. I guess he wasn’t completely satisfied. He said he’d have to get back to me. He said he’d call Maitland himself, and then he’d have to talk to the FBI Director.

And did he?

Well, I wasn’t there, you know.

This isn’t a court proceeding. We have no rules against hearsay evidence. We’re simply trying to compose an overall picture.

All right. As far as I know he talked to both of them-Maitland and the FBI in Washington. Anyhow, he called me back and said he’d talked to them.

Fine. And what was the result?

He said it looked like we’d better go ahead arid give them the money. He was having a letter-order prepared, and as soon as he signed it, he’d put it on the Xerox-phone to me so that I’d get a facsimile copy of it in case there was any flak. But he told me not to wait for it to come through, it would take at least an hour. He told me to go ahead and order the money put together and sent over to the Merchants Trust.

At what time did you receive that instruction?

By the time he’d called Maitland and asked all his questions, and then called the FBI chief and talked to him, and then called me back-let’s see, it must have been right around two fifteen in the afternoon, give or take five minutes.

And how long did you anticipate it would take to get the money to Maitland’s office?

Well, it had to be counted, didn’t it? Not note by note, but stack by stack at least. And it had to be packed into some sort of carry-containers. And we had to arrange for a guard on it in transit, and we had to whistle up an armored truck. Figuring on traffic and time-in-motion and all the rest of it, I called Maitland and told him he couldn’t expect to get delivery in less than an hour and a half.

In other words the earliest you could promise it would be a quarter to four?

I told him we’d make every effort to do it faster than that, but it didn’t look humanly possible to shave very much time off that estimate.

You were aware that the deadline for delivery was three o’clock?

Yes. I was. But there was nothing I could do about it.

Grofeld (Cont’d)

We’re deeply grateful to you for your typescript, Captain. You’ve done an amazing job of reconstructing the backgrounds of the two men.

Well, the department gave me time off to compile the dossiers on them, Mr. Skinner, and I’ve had a month on it.

It’s a remarkable job of detective work, nonetheless. And while I’m no judge of writing styles, I must say it’s far more readable than most of the official documents one sees.

Well, thanks. I’m a part-time fiction writer, of course. I guess some of it’s too flowery. It probably needs editing.

Not by me. In any case I wonder if you’d let me ask you some questions about your own participation in the case.

Fire away.

You arrived in Mr. Maitland’s office at what time?

Somewhere around twelve forty-five in the afternoon.

Mr. Azzard of the FBI was there?

He’d arrived a bit ahead of me. Of course, I’d been monitoring the situation from my office for more than an hour by that time, but I decided I’d better get over there personally in case there was something I could contribute. I guess it was partly vanity and partly impatience-I just couldn’t stand being on the periphery any longer. The truth of the matter is, as far as police department business was concerned, Sergeant O’Brien had the situation as well in hand as anybody could. He’s an excellent officer. I’ve submitted him for a citation.

He certainly seems to deserve some recognition, I agree. Now, it wasn’t until about two twenty that you received definite word that the money would be delivered, but not until forty-five minutes after Ryterband’s deadline?

That’s right. We got a call from someone at the Federal Reserve. That call came at two seventeen. They said it would be at least ninety minutes before we had the money.

But you’d suspected as much earlier, hadn’t you? I mean almost everybody seems to have felt it would be impossible to get the money up so quickly.

Yes. Matter of fact I remember we were very surprised up there when they told us they could have it to us by three forty-five. We’d never expected it could be done that early.

What I’m getting at, Captain, is that someone must have gone to Charles Ryterband and said to him that it wasn’t possible to raise the money in time.

We were all trying to convince him of that.

At what time, and by whom, was this matter first brought to Ryterband’s attention?

I don’t know. By the time I got there he’d already been told that.

In other words Ryterband had been informed of the probable delay, and he’d been informed at some time prior to your arrival at twelve forty-five.

Actually I expect that must have been one of Maitland’s first statements to Ryterband.

Yes, Mr. Maitland says it was. I’m simply trying to pin down the fact that Ryterband was not only informed of it, but was actually aware of it. The point being that a lot of people were talking at him incessantly and there’s some doubt as to how much of it actually penetrated his consciousness. He must have been highly confused by all the activity.

He was flustered, yes. But he was in control of himself. He was aware of the fact that we didn’t expect to be able to deliver the money on time.

Fine. That’s what I wanted to establish. Now, how did he react to that information?

I’d call it stubborn disbelief. He refused to accept it. From what he said, I gathered he was utterly convinced that men with money could do anything. If they couldn’t raise the money in time, it meant they didn’t want to. That was how he felt about it.

And you tried to convince him otherwise?

We all did. We took turns at him. Hell, we had to convince him. We weren’t trying to put anything over on him. We were telling him the truth. We had to make him see that.

And did you?

Not for quite a while, no. Finally we started to penetrate, I think. He began to waver. He got on the radio and told Craycroft the situation down there.

How did Craycroft respond?

At first it was the same as Ryterband’s initial reaction. All he said was “Negative.” I remember Mr. Rabinowitz, the bank’s security officer, throwing his hands violently into the air at that moment and wheeling away from us in despair. I think that gesture had an impact on Ryterband-he saw it, he saw that Rabinowitz was honestly distraught. I think that’s what convinced Ryterband that we were telling him the truth about the time factor.

And what did Ryterband do then?

He got back on the radio and talked some more. You could tell by his voice that he was honestly desperate-that, in a funny way, he was on our side.

Did that seem to change Craycroft’s attitude at all?

No. Not a bit. You’ve had this information from the other witnesses, haven’t you?

I’d like your recollection of it, Captain.

There was a discussion between Craycroft and Ryterband about the fuel situation. Of course, none of us had any hint about their getaway plan then. You know about that now, don’t you, from Mrs. Ryterband?

Yes. Go on.

Well, they were arguing. Ryterband said they could afford to shave an hour off the fuel margin. He said something about, “If they pay the ransom, you can ditch the bombs over open water. It’ll extend the range by reducing the weight of the plane.”

But Craycroft wouldn’t buy that?

No. He kept saying, “Negative.” Nothing would budge him. It was damned depressing. Because it made it crystal clear to us that we were dealing with a crazy man. He’d made his plan and he was too damned rigid to deviate from it, even if it meant the difference between success and failure. We were convinced he didn’t really care whether the money was paid or not. We were convinced he’d just as soon drop the damn bombs.

Harris (Cont’d)

Now at about one forty-five, as I reconstruct it from the other testimony, you and Sergeant O’Brien were over by the window watching the airplane pass overhead. You’d already run through the taped film of the plane that you’d taken from the helicopter. Is that substantially correct?

It might have been closer to one fifty, one fifty-five.

And at that point you were speculating about Craycroft’s intentions. Whether he meant to bomb the city regardless of what was done on the ground.

Well, yes. I mean, suppose we did come up with the ransom on time? It didn’t look likely even then, but suppose it did work out. His partner collects the money at three and he’s long gone by five ten. What’s to prevent this screwball from dropping the bombs anyway? I mean, we didn’t know for sure what he’d do, but the way things were going, it was obvious we couldn’t count on his sanity.

Of course, this was after he had refused repeated requests by his own brother-in-law to postpone the deadline.

That’s right.

Please forgive my repetitiousness, Mr. Harris. It’s just that we’d like this record to be as accurate as possible.

I work the same way as a reporter, Mr. Skinner. You ask the same question ten times, phrase it a little differently each time, and maybe once or twice out of the ten you pick up a new piece of information you didn’t have before.

Exactly. Now, both you and Sergeant O’Brien knew quite a bit about airplanes. The sergeant served as a bombardier during the war, and you have a pilot’s license. At this time, talking with O’Brien at the window, and with the memory of your teletape close-ups fresh in your minds, you began to discuss the problem from a technical standpoint. Is that correct?

That’s correct.

As it turned out, this discussion between the two of you was to have considerable importance. Do you think you could reconstruct that conversation now, for our record?

I can hit the high spots. Of course a lot of that conversation was unspoken. I mean, certain things were obvious in the context of the moment and didn’t have to be vocalized. Like the things that had been going around in the room just before we talked. General Adler arriving, for example, with all his Neanderthal notions about don’t pay the ransom or take Charlie Ryterband up on the roof and jam a gun up his ass.

Is that what he suggested? Or was it to “put a gun to his head”?

“Jam it up his ass and pull the trigger.” That’s what he said, verbatim. I’m a reporter, and I was there. But I’m sure he’d deny it now.

About your discussion with Sergeant O’Brien…

Right. But you’ve got to understand the background-the motivation. I hate that word, incidentally, but it fits. We were motivated by the fact that we felt there was a fair chance Craycroft was crazy enough to drop his bombs whether or not the ransom was paid. Therefore, it was worth considering any solution, no matter how loony. You follow?

Certainly. Could you reconstruct the conversation now?

I’m trying to. But in my business you learn that the words that are spoken are no more important than the context in which they’re spoken. In other words, that talk I had with Billy O’Brien would have been totally irresponsible if we’d honestly felt that Craycroft would go away quietly after the ransom was paid.

Go on, please. I understand your qualification completely.

Good. Here’s the best way to describe it. You ever been to a really bad movie, where you knew what the next line of dialogue was going to be?

I’m sure we all have.

We had that movie right in front of us. The stars were General Adler and the FBI clown, Azzard. They were thundering around the place, coming up with one outrageous scheme after another. O’Brien and I were over on the fringe of it, and the way it started. he and I started making remarks under our breaths about these two jokers and their wild-hair ideas. Azzard wanting to shoot the plane down, Adler talking about scooping the plane up with some crazy kind of net, stuff like that. It was absurd. But it was funny. In a situation like that you’re under incredible stress, and it doesn’t take much to send you over the line from tension to laughter. I don’t excuse it. O’Brien and I were making jokes about it. About how Adler was the one who ought to be hauled away in a net. Or putting Azzard inside the cannon and shooting him at the airplane. Really poor jokes, you know? But, anyhow, it got us off on this crazy tangent of needling each other into coming up with wilder and wilder schemes. Soaring fancies about how you could stop Craycroft. O’Brien said what we ought to do is run a big ladder up from the Empire State Building and grab him with a skyhook when he flew by. I said the best way to handle it was to call him on the radio and tell him his house was on fire, he better get right home. It went on like that.

But it led you to more concrete, realistic ideas, didn’t it?

Yes. You couldn’t keep laughing it off. The thing I remember mainly is we figured we had to analyze his flight path. Finally we called Walter DeFeo at the Civil Defense Emergency office. He was in touch with the air-traffic controllers at the three airports-that was part of his job. He got us the flight plan from the radar people at JFK traffic control. In the bank office Maitland had a map of the five boroughs with red dots to indicate the locations of the Merchants Trust branches. We defaced hell out of that map with one of those felt marker pens, drawing Craycroft’s flight path. He followed the same route every circuit except for the variations he made in his crossings of the East River. Obviously he’d decided to do random crossings over the three bridges just in case we tried to set something up to ambush him when he was over the river. But the rest of it you could just about plot him on a street map.

What was the flight path exactly?

He’d go diagonally uptown from Front Street. Up First Avenue and then Lexington Avenue, and then he’d ease out toward York Avenue to make his left turn at the north end of his swing. That was a very tight turn for a B-17. He kept it directly above Manhattan, never going wide of land. The peak of the turn was right over Cathedral Parkway-a Hundred and Tenth Street, at the north end of Central Park. He’d swing back south over Riverside Drive at about Ninety-sixth Street and he’d head right down Broadway, all the way down. He never even went above Central Park. He kept it above heavily populated buildings every foot of the way. Finally down to Canal and start his leftward turn over the financial district. He went straight over City Hall and kept turning left so he’d end up crossing the East River above the Brooklyn Bridge or the Manhattan Bridge. He’d do a figure-eight turn over northwestern Brooklyn and come back across to Manhattan either by the same route he’d used before, or up across the Williamsburg Bridge. And so on, the circle as before. It took less time to plot it on the map than it does to describe it.

Go on.

The weather was cloudy that day. Mostly cloudy, a few patches of hazy clear sky here and there. But of course he was well below the clouds. I suppose the clouds were at four or five thousand feet. They weren’t rain clouds.

Did that enter into your calculations?

It entered into our wishes, that’s for sure. But wishes don’t make facts. We saw pretty quickly how it would be easy to outfox him if the clouds were lower.

Oh? How?

Confuse his instruments when he was flying inside a cloud.

What good would that do?

Well, we figured it this way. There was one point where he was vulnerable. It was up at the top of his swing, when he was making that tight turn across the top of Central Park. If he miscalculated just a little bit, he’d be out over the Hudson River.

I see. Continue, please.

At that point the Hudson is more than a mile wide. We figured if you could coax him out over the Hudson, you could shoot him down. The altitude he was flying, he and his bombs would hit the river. They wouldn’t cross over as far as the New Jersey shore. He was only about a quarter of a mile above sea level.

There was no other point in his flight path which coincided with that possibility?

No. At the southern end of the oval-it was an oval, not a circle really-he had that other turn, a ninety-degree turn across the Wall Street district and then his figure eight over Brooklyn-but that took him across the East River, not the Hudson. The East River isn’t a river at all, it’s a saltwater channel between two islands in the Atlantic Ocean: Manhattan and Long Island. It’s very narrow-not even a quarter the width of the Hudson River. If you shot him down over the East River he might crash in Brooklyn.

I see. Go on, then.

Well, a lot of this gets pretty technical. I’ll try to explain it as simply as I can, but you’ve got to remember it took a lot less time than this for O’Brien and me to discuss it, because we used a lot of airman’s shorthand.

I appreciate that. Do try to keep it to layman’s terms if you can.

Right. First, let’s consider the flight path. You draw a half-circle from Ninety-sixth and York Avenue to a Hundred and Tenth Street and Lenox Avenue-the peak of his swing-over to Ninety-sixth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Manhattan is a bit less than two miles wide at that point. But the diameter of his circle was less than that. There’s a lot of centripetal force in a tight turn like that, and he was ending his turn above Amsterdam Avenue-which is four blocks inland from the Hudson River-because if he didn’t he’d be wide open. If his circle had been wider, we’d have been able to shoot him down while he was over West End Avenue, say, or Riverside Drive. The centripetal force would have spun both the airplane and the bombs out into the river.

I think I understand. He had to keep the diameter of his turn well inland from the shore, because otherwise, if he’d dropped his bombs, they’d have been dragged out past the shoreline by centripetal force.

Right. He was making a one hundred eighty-degree turn with a radius of something like three-quarters of a mile-a very tight turn for a big airplane; he wasn’t going very fast, of course, but he still had to bank steeply in those turns. The point is, it was a delicate and precise maneuver. The slightest miscalculation and he goes too far-and we’ve got him.

Then, you decided the thing to do was find a way to make him miscalculate.

Easier said than done, I can assure you. That’s why it would have been beautiful if we’d had low clouds drifting through up there. He flies into a cloud, you deflect his compasses and he wouldn’t know where the hell he was. Hit him at the right moment and even if he panicked and hit the bombs-away button, all he’d do would be to blow a few holes in the Hudson River.

But there weren’t any clouds at that altitude, were there?

Nope. That stumped us.

What about the matter of deflecting his compasses? That’s not easy either, is it?

Not easy, no. But possible.

At what time did you and Sergeant O’Brien propose the idea of the crop duster?

Must have been about two thirty.

Grofeld (Cont’d)

A little while ago you mentioned that the call from the Federal Reserve saying the money would be at least forty-five minutes late arriving came at two seventeen. What was done then?

I reported this information to the room at large. Then I went over to Charles Ryterband and talked to him. I explained, as reasonably as I could under the circumstances, that we were doing our damnedest to comply with his demands-their demands. I said he could see that we had every reason to do so, and no reason not to. I said we were doing everything in our power, and that we were acting in good faith. I told him there would be a delay, but that it was completely beyond our control. The money would be delivered by three forty-five at the very latest, I told him. I went on like that, trying to impress the truth on him, trying to get through to the poor confused bastard. After a while I could see it was sinking in. Mr. Toombes and I-and even Mr. Azzard-all implored him to explain this development to his partner and do everything in his power to persuade his partner to grant us the extra time.

And did Ryterband do as you asked?

Yes. And, believe me, his heart was in it. I have a suspicion that he was overwhelmed, himself, by the magnitude of the crime. That he walked into the damned thing only half-awake, only half-aware of what he was doing, and that he was coming to his senses somehow. Actually it was only a few minutes after that that he broke down completely and wept.

But before that he talked to Craycroft, didn’t he?

Yes.

And got no response?

He got a response. It was negative, like all the previous ones.

Craycroft just wouldn’t budge at all?

Three o’clock was the deadline. That was that, as far as he was concerned.

What happened then?

First there was an interruption. General Adler. He came thundering across the room. He said if the son of a bitch was going to drop his bombs anyway, we might as well go ahead and shoot him down. He said that way at least we could make the choice as to where the bombs would fall.

He said that, did he?

He said we should hit the plane when it was making the turn from Central Park across upper Manhattan. That way, he said, either the bombs would swing out into the river, or if worst came to worst-these are his words-he said, “At least they’ll only hit Harlem.”

That’s verbatim?

He seemed to think some of us are more expendable than others.

I see. Well, let’s get on, shall we, to what happened after General Adler’s interruption.

Well, that was when Ryterband broke down.

Describe that, if you would?

Well, I’ve tried to sort it out in retrospect, with the aid of the backgrounding I’ve done on the two men. I can’t say I can explain it in such a way that it makes complete sense. He seemed to fall apart all of a sudden. He’d been on the verge of hysterics all afternoon, but this was something else, this was different. He was involved in something daring, something of tremendous risk-naturally he’d be nervous and scared and ready to hit the ceiling at the slightest provocation. Anybody would, especially a basically nonviolent type like Ryterband, who had no experience of crime or dealing with people on a basis of threats and extortion. It’s become apparent that Craycroft had only sprung the whole thing on him a few hours earlier that same day.

Well, they’d discussed the plan for months…

Only in theory. Only as a make-believe fantasy. You’ve talked with Mrs. Ryterband?

Yes.

Then you know Craycroft only revealed that same morning his intention to put the theory into practice. That’s what she claims, anyhow, and I see no compelling reason to disbelieve it. I think the idea must have galvanized Ryterband at first. They’d spent months rationalizing it, of course-the motives, the evil of the New York businessmen villains, the righteousness of their cause, even the peculiarly fitting use of that antique airplane.

All right, we’ll accept that as a basis.

The point is I think when Craycroft got him out of bed that morning and sprang it on him, Ryterband must have been excited as hell. It must have got his adrenaline pumping at a hell of a rate. Pure excitement carried him for quite a while. But then, up there in that crowded office with all of us trying to reason with him at once, something happened to him. I don’t know what it was. Maybe remorse. Maybe he realized Craycroft was-loony. Maybe he began to see that his love and loyalty had taken him much too far-and that it was much too late to turn back even if he wanted to. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I just don’t know for sure.

But he broke down, you say. In what way?

A lot of it was incoherent. He burst into tears. A real crying jag.

Did he say anything you could understand?

I honestly can’t remember. Nothing memorable.

But he did go into a form of hysterics? Is that a fair statement?

Yes. Of course, it terrified most of us.

Why?

He was our only contact with the guy in the airplane with the bombs. If Ryterband lost his marbles, that was the end of it.

But in the end he didn’t lose his marbles. Not in an obvious way.

No. He made an extraordinary effort of will. You could see it physically when he made this extreme attempt to pull himself together.

And succeeded.

In a way. It took quite a while. Oh, perhaps not in clock time-maybe not more than three or four minutes. But standing there, it was like watching the restoration of a statue from shattered fragments. He literally put himself back together. I’ve never quite seen anything like it. Finally he did a strange thing. He lifted his head up-he was sitting in an armchair beside the two-way radio set-and he put his hands out, very wide. And he begged our forgiveness.

Forgiveness for what?

He didn’t say.

I see.

He didn’t make any excuses for himself. He didn’t even try.

I see. Wasn’t that an abrupt change of heart?

Yes. Don’t ask me to explain it.

What happened next?

Well, it was then about two thirty. We had no more than half an hour before the money was supposed to appear, according to Craycroft’s schedule. According to ours we had an hour and a quarter, but I don’t think any of us were very sure we’d live that long. He was making a pass directly over the bank every nine minutes. I think most of us assumed he’d use the bank for one of his targets.

Even with Ryterband in the bank?

We didn’t know very much about Harold Craycroft at that juncture, Mr. Skinner. Ryterband had called him “Harold,” but we didn’t even know his last name. But we did know one thing for sure. We knew he was psycho. Moving up on the deadline, that knowledge was getting to all of us.

You mean people were getting rattled.

Getting more rattled. We’d been rattled all day, for God’s sake. (Laughter) Anyhow, by this time everybody was talking at once and nobody much was listening. I remember particularly General Adler was yelling at nobody in particular about a survey he’d worked on. It chilled me right down to my toes.