Free Protocol for a Kidnapping by Ross Thomas

out a page, and handed it to me. There was an address and a name; the name was Bill Jones.
    “Bill Jones?” I said.
    He nodded, smiling and chuckling nastily, much as he had done over the phone when he found the name of the café amusing. “He is a countryman of yours and an old friend of mine. We were together during the war. Afterwards, because of a girl, my friend Bill Jones came back and now here he lives.” He pronounced Jones as if it began with a Y , but that’s what happens to the J in Yugoslavia.
    “What’s he do?” I said.
    Tavro shrugged. “He has done what any man must do to earn his living. He has driven a lorry and laid bricks and carpentered and dug ditches and repaired machinery. He is a man who can use his hands but who has never worked in a factory. And to my knowledge he has never worked long at anything, but still he has raised a family.”
    “What’s he do when he’s not working?” I said.
    “He fishes and when he’s not fishing, he hunts. And when he’s doing neither, he sits in the café and drinks his brandy and reads his newspaper and gossips with the rest. He is not an intellectual, Mr. St. Ives. He is just a man who fought well during the war, liked the country in which he fought, and who returned to live and work in it. And if he did not work too hard or make too great a contribution, what does that matter?”
    “Not much,” I said.
    “Do you find it strange that an American would do this?”
    “I’d find it strange if many did it, but not one.”
    “He has no politics. If you wish to get a message to me, leave it with him.”
    “It’ll probably be a few days,” I said.
    “It must be no longer than that.”
    “You’re in a hurry?”
    Tavro produced a cigarette and carefully turned it in his big fingers before lighting it. “I assume that you know who I was at one time and what post I held?”
    I nodded. “Confidential assistant to the head of your secret police. I don’t remember what they call it.”
    “They call it the UDBA,” he said. “I was accused, whether justly or unjustly is of no matter now, along with Vice-President Rankovic and removed from my post. For the past several years I have done little. I have read a great deal, something I never had time for before, and I have raised some fine flowers—do you care for flowers, Mr. St. Ives, for roses, especially?”
    “Roses are fine,” I said.
    “I have been exceptionally fortunate with mine. But to continue, I have lived these past few years, except for the surveillance which is now only cursory, much as a man in exile might live. I have few friends, none of them in government. My family is scattered, my wife is dead. So I thought that I had been forgotten, as a deposed politician should be. I was mistaken.”
    “How?”
    “There are those who want the information I have. At first they tried to persuade me. I refused. Then they threatened me and—” He spread his hands. “I believed them.”
    “So you went to see Killingsworth,” I said.
    “Yes. A fatuous man, but still shrewd enough not to offer me help unless I first gave him the information—one hundred and two pages of it.”
    “And then he got kidnapped,” I said.
    “Yes,” Tavro said, nodding a little cynically. “Kidnapped. Convenient wasn’t it?”
    “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “How long do you think you have?”
    “Before what?”
    “Before whoever wants you to give them that information carries out their threat—whatever it is.”
    “The threat, Mr. St. Ives, is that they will kill me. I have every reason to believe them.”
    I nodded. “All right. How long do you have?”
    He shrugged. “Five days, possibly six.” He gestured almost apologetically. “There is no set deadline.”
    “That’s still cutting it thin,” I said.
    “Yes, Mr. St. Ives, it is. You have only a few hours to come up with a successful plan. However, there is one consolation.”
    “What?”
    He rose, leaned toward me over the table, and