Word: ravens
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...release, Bronfman must pay $4.6 million, and the money must be paid in cash, with no more than half of the bills in an "uncirculated" condition and at least 200,000 of them in $10 denomination. The kidnapers would use the code name "Raven" in making contact with the family and would disguise their voices with speech-altering devices. To signal that the ransom was ready for delivery, the Bronfman family should place a personal ad, signed "Fred Bollard," in New York newspapers...
...requested $4.6 million in the back of a station wagon. It was stuffed into black plastic garbage bags. He drove to a parking lot at Kennedy Airport, then, while FBI agents observed from a distance, walked to the specified phone booth. At 8:10 the phone rang. Using the Raven identification, the caller directed Bronfman to another phone booth, in the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines section of the terminal. He waited an hour with no further word. At 9:30 p.m., the kidnapers called the Yorktown house, telling the family to get Bronfman back to the first booth at J.F.K...
...went back to the original J.F.K. phone booth, pacing back and forth outside it for hours. Finally, the phone rang. "Not tonight ... tomorrow ... tomorrow," said a voice. One of the conspirators had apparently been scouting the terminal area and had seen Bronfman there. The arrangements were confirmed in another Raven call to Yorktown. The drop would be at 8 p.m. Friday night, same place. "No cops. No feds," warned the caller...
MIDNIGHT is A PLACE. 287 pages. Viking. $6.95. ARABEL'S RAVEN. 118 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. Both by Joan Aiken. The author of that incomparable melodrama The Wolves of Willoughby Chase has two remarkably different books out this year, both splendid. Midnight Is a Place is a savage yet romantic tale about what befalls a boy and girl, suddenly homeless and penniless, in a terrifyingly real and at the same time satisfyingly imaginary industrial city in 19th century Britain. This smoke-filled place is appropriately called Blastburn. Among other chores for survival, the girl collects cigar butts from gutters...
Arabel's Raven is considerably less intricate. It concerns a large, grumpy bird named Mortimer who takes up residence in a lower-middle-class British household, also inhabited by a small girl named Arabel. Mortimer's unquenchable hope is to find diamonds in the family coal scuttle, but he soon branches into carpet eating, letter spearing and serving as unwilling accessory to a diamond heist conducted by a trained squirrel and a pair of inept gangsters...