After the last mysterious phone call, Milton had waited for another. The following Sunday morning it came.

“Hello?”

“Good morning, Milton.”

“Listen, whoever you are. I want some answers.”

“I didn’t call to hear what you want, Milton. What’s important is what I want.”

“I want my daughter. Where is she?”

“She’s here with me.”

The music, or singing, was still perceptible in the background. It reminded Milton of something long ago.

“How do I know you have her?”

“Why don’t you ask me a question? She’s told me a lot about her family. Quite a lot.”

The rage surging through Milton at that moment was nearly unbearable. It was all he could do to keep from smashing the phone against the desk. At the same time, he was thinking, calculating.

“What’s the name of the village her grandparents came from?”

“Just a minute.” The phone was covered. Then the voice said, “Bithynios.”

Milton’s knees went weak. He sat down at the desk.

“Do you believe me yet, Milton?”

“We went to these caverns in Tennessee once. A real rip-off tourist trap. What were they called?”

Again the phone was covered. In a moment the voice replied, “The Mammothonics Caves.”

At that Milton shot up out of his chair again. His face darkened and he tugged at his collar to help himself breathe.

“Now I have a question, Milton.”

“What?”

“How much is it worth to you to get your daughter back?”

“How much do you want?”

“Is this business, now? Are we negotiating a deal?”

“I’m ready to make a deal.”

“How exciting.”

“What do you want?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“All right.”

“No, Milton,” the voice corrected, “you don’t understand. I want to bargain.”

“What?”

“Haggle, Milton. This is business.”

Milton was perplexed. He shook his head at the oddity of this request. But in the end he fulfilled it.

“Okay. Twenty-five’s too much. I’ll pay thirteen thousand.”

“We’re talking about your daughter, Milton. Not hot dogs.”

“I haven’t got that kind of cash.”

“I might take twenty-two thousand.”

“I’ll give you fifteen.”

“Twenty is as low as I can go.”

“Seventeen is my final offer.”

“How about nineteen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen five.”

“Deal.”

The caller laughed. “Oh, that was fun, Milt.” Then, in a gruff voice: “But I want twenty-five.” And he hung up.

Back in 1933, a disembodied voice had spoken to my grandmother through the heating grate. Now, forty-two years later, a disguised voice spoke to my father over the phone.

“Good morning, Milton.”

There was the music again, the faint singing.

“I’ve got the money,” said Milton. “Now I want my girl.”

“Tomorrow night,” the kidnapper said. And then he told Milton where to leave the money, and where to wait for me to be released.

Across the lowland downriver plain Grand Trunk rose before Milton’s Cadillac. The train station was still in use in 1975, though just barely. The once-opulent terminal was now only a shell. False Amtrak façades concealed the flaking, peeling walls. Most corridors were blocked off. Meanwhile, all around the operative core, the great old building continued to fall into ruin, the Guastavino tiles in the Palm Court falling, splintering on the ground, the immense barbershop now a junk room, the skylights caved in, heaped with filth. The office tower attached to the terminal was now a thirteen-story pigeon coop, all five hundred of its windows smashed, as if with diligence. At this same train station my grandparents had arrived a half century earlier. Lefty and Desdemona, one time only, had revealed their secret here to Sourmelina; and now their son, who never learned it, was pulling in behind the station, also secretly.

A scene like this, a ransom scene, calls for a noirish mood: shadows, sinister silhouettes. But the sky wasn’t cooperating. We were having one of our pink nights. They happened every so often, depending on temperature and the level of chemicals in the air. When particulate matter in the atmosphere was sufficient, light from the ground got trapped and reflected back, and the entire Detroit sky would become the soft pink of cotton candy. It never got dark on pink nights, but the light was nothing like daytime. Our pink nights glowed with the raw luminescence of the night shift, of factories running around the clock. Sometimes the sky would become as bright as Pepto-Bismol, but more often it was a muted, a fabric-softener color. Nobody thought it was strange. Nobody said anything about it. We had all grown up with pink nights. They were not a natural phenomenon, but they were natural to us.

Under this strange nocturnal sky Milton pulled his car as close to the train platform as possible and stopped. He shut off the engine. Taking the briefcase, he got out into the still, crystalline winter air of Michigan. All the world was frozen, the distant trees, the telephone lines, the grass in the yards of the downriver houses, the ground itself. Out on the river a freighter bellowed. Here there were no sounds, the station completely deserted at night. Milton had on his tasseled black loafers. Dressing in the dark, he had decided they were the easiest to slip on. He was also wearing his car coat, beige and dingy, with a muff of fur at the collar. Against the cold he had worn a hat, a gray felt Borsalino, with a red feather in the black band. An old-timer’s hat now in 1975. With hat, briefcase, and loafers, Milton might have been on his way to work. And certainly he was walking quickly. He climbed the metal steps to the train platform. He headed along it, looking for the trash can where he was supposed to drop the briefcase. The kidnapper said it would have an X chalked on the lid.

Milton hurried along the platform, the tassels on his loafers bouncing, the tiny feather in his hat rippling in the cold wind. It would not be strictly truthful to say that he was afraid. Milton Stephanides did not admit to being afraid. The physiological manifestations of fear, the racing heart, the torched armpits, went on in him without official acknowledgment. He wasn’t alone among his generation in this. There were lots of fathers who shouted when they were afraid or scolded their children to deflect blame from themselves. It’s possible that such qualities were indispensable in the generation that won the war. A lack of introspection was good for bolstering your courage, but in the last months and weeks it had done damage to Milton. Throughout my disappearance Milton had kept up a brave front while doubts worked invisibly inside him. He was like a statue being chiseled away from the inside, hollowed out. As more and more of his thoughts gave him pain, Milton had increasingly avoided them. Instead he concentrated on the few that made him feel better, the bromides about everything working out. Milton, quite simply, had ceased to think things through. What was he doing out there on the dark train platform? Why did he go out there alone? We would never be able to explain it adequately.

It didn’t take him long to find the trash can marked with chalk. Swiftly Milton lifted its triangular green lid and laid the briefcase inside. But when he tried to pull his arm back out, something wouldn’t let him: it was his hand. Since Milton had stopped thinking things through, his body was now doing the work for him. His hand seemed to be saying something. It was voicing reservations. “What if the kidnapper doesn’t set Callie free?” the hand was saying. But Milton answered, “There’s no time to think about that now.” Again he tried to pull his arm out of the trash can, but his hand stubbornly resisted: “What if the kidnapper takes this money and then asks for more?” asked the hand. “That’s the chance we’ll have to take,” Milton snapped back, and with all his strength pulled his arm out of the trash can. His hand lost its grip; the briefcase fell onto the refuse inside. Milton hurried back across the platform (dragging his hand with him) and got into the Cadillac.