Edward also became more vocal. "We just wanted to fuck with Kurt's mind. He's a Republican now, but he talks about his FFF days like he's some Greatest Generation hero, wiping up the floor with Nazis. I mean, like, the movie about the FFF will have Tom Hanks in it playing Kurt. This guy is totally fucked up, and we were just giving him a hard time about it, that's all."

"Then you might or might not be happy to know," I told them, "that until Leo Moyle was kidnapped, Jay Plankton thought of you all as brothers and sisters under the skin, and admirably insolent and hugely entertaining. He talked about putting you all on his show-pending the outcome, of course, of a pre-interview and probably an exhaustive strip search."

"Well, that sucks!" Pheromone said.

"What a bunch of perverts," Edward added.

But Charm had grown thoughtful. "And now he's changed his mind?" she asked.

"Because of the Leo Moyle thing?"

"That would be my guess."

"Oh."

"You can ask him yourself, if you're interested. I'm sure he'll be wanting to be in touch with you. His attorneys will, anyway, along with the police and the FBI. If you didn't do the kidnapping, or even the tear-gas job, it'll probably be easy enough for you to prove it. And if eventually you do go on the air with the J-Bird, I know I'll be sure to tune in."

Pheromone said, "Going on the radio is for shit, so don't try to drag me in on this one, Charm. But I suppose we'll have to tell them we didn't do it. The tear gas or the kidnapping, I mean. We can give them some of our DNA- though I'll bet it's hard to prove a negative unless the J-Bird was, like, raped."

Charm was looking even more worried. "Do you think we'll need a lawyer?"

"That might be wise," I said.

"Shit. I'll have to call Dad in Nimes. He's going to be spitting afterbirth."

On that vivid note, I advised Charm, Pheromone, and Edward to stay put in the Berkshires. I told them that flight from official investigators would be inadvisable. I suggested they tell Kurt Zinsser what they had done and to say that he should expect the police to show up shortly. The three of them took all of this in sullenly, but they all seemed to get my drift and they didn't argue.

Back outside, Thad was just returning to the car. He told me he had given the main house, the barn and the other Stankewitz outbuildings an apparently undetected quick scouring, inside and out, and he could find no trace of Leo Moyle or any other person. He said all the Stankewitz locks were old and simple and "a piece of cake."

Inside the car, though, Timmy was itching to give us his own amazing report. He had been monitoring WCBS all-news radio from New York, and moments earlier he had heard that Leo Moyle had just been released by the FFF largely unharmed. But now Jay Plankton himself had been abducted.

Chapter 15

"It was a beautiful operation," Lyle Barner was telling me. "It could have been carried out by the finest SWAT team in the country, or maybe by the Mossad. Here, this guy's got some of the best security in the city, outside of the Secret Service when Clinton's in town, and these people move in and snatch Plankton up like he's a calzone at Sbarro, and just like that-kapooey!-the J-Bird is up in smoke."

This was said in a Chinese restaurant on Sixty-fifth Street, not far from Jay Plankton's apartment building, at the entrance to which he had been abducted seven hours earlier. Thad and I had dropped Timmy off back in Albany and driven to the city in Thad's truck. Thad and I agreed that for the time being he should steer clear of Barner, so he said he would go spend the night with an old Lancaster County friend in Brooklyn. I had asked him if there was an Amish ethnic enclave in one of the outer boroughs, like the Polish in Greenpoint or the Indians in Jackson Heights, but he said no.

"It was like they'd rehearsed it a hundred times," Barner went on. "At least fourteen people saw the whole thing, and they all said it happened so fast that nobody really knew what had gone down, until Moyle started yelling that he was Leo Moyle of the Jay Plankton Show, and he'd been kidnapped and let go and somebody should summon an officer."

The switch-Moyle for Plankton-had indeed been deft, Barner told me. As the security-service Bronco carrying Plankton pulled up at the entrance to the apartment building and Plankton stepped out with his two armed guards, a second SUV, a green Lincoln Navigator, came up from behind. Two men in black jeans, black turtlenecks and gas masks emerged and fired pepper spray at Plankton and his protectors and at the Bronco's driver. It sounded to me like the feds swooping in and snatching little Elian Gonzalez in Miami, overpowering Donato-the-fisherman-slash-cleaning-service-operator, and gassing the praying grandmothers in front of the house. I wondered, Did I detect the fine hand of Janet Reno here? Much as the Clinton administration must have loathed the J-Bird, an abduction by Justice Department paramilitaries didn't sound like the answer.

An NYPD patrol car arrived at the scene within two minutes of Moyle's release and the J-Bird's capture, Barner said, but the Navigator had made a clean getaway. By the time a description of the vehicle went out, the kidnappers had apparently switched cars. For the Lincoln was soon spotted abandoned under the FDR Drive near Thirty-eighth Street. The car had been stolen earlier that morning, police soon discovered, from in front of a real estate office in New Rochelle. One potential witness thought she had seen the switch from the Navigator to a gray, brown or light blue van, but the description was too vague to be of any help.

Moyle, Barner told me, was taken by patrol car to Lenox Hill Hospital, where he was examined and found to be exhausted but not physically harmed in any serious way. His mental state, however, was described as precarious. This was owing in part to the fearful ordeal overall, but in particular to his two newly acquired tattoos, one on each upper arm. They were both large, still fresh, and a little sore. One pictured big red lips and said, "Kiss Me, Elton". The other said, " I love Ricky Martin".

The tattoos had been applied to Moyle involuntarily while he was tied down, blindfolded, and had a gun held to his head, he told police. He pleaded that word of his new body art not be made public. But Barner, who arrived on the scene twenty minutes after the first patrol car, had to break it to Moyle that the news would almost certainly leak out, probably via hospital employees. Anyway, the issue was soon moot, for the kidnappers-or their friends or cocon-spirators-dropped off digital photos of Moyle's new look at the lobbies of the Times, the Post and the Daily News.

This suggested to Barner, and to me, that more than a few people were involved in whatever was going on here. No ransom note had yet been received by anyone the police knew of. So far, the tattoos were the only message.

Barner said he didn't know much about tattoos, and he asked me, "Can tattoos be removed, or are people stuck with them for the rest of their lives?"

"I don't know," I told him, "but in Massachusetts I ran into a guy who had a tattoo on his arm that said 'Robert Forever', and Robert had turned out to be less than forever.

But the tattoo was still there, so maybe they're hard to shed."

Barner and I were set to meet with Moyle in an hour or so, after his release from Lenox Hill, and tattoo removal seemed to both of us a subject Moyle would be eager to discuss.

I said to Barner, "The tabloids are going to have a lot of fun with this. They undoubtedly adore Moyle at the Post, but public humiliation of a C-list celeb is their meat, and the festering tattoo work sounds to me like surefire page-one stuff. I'm sure that at this very moment the Post has a reporter assigned to getting a quote from Ricky Martin."