Walking Dead Man

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Would it shock you to know that Claude St. Germaine was not the only man I had hanged in the dark days?” he asked. None of us spoke.

  “It was just thirty years ago,” he said. “The boy couldn’t have been more than four or five years old.”

  “The boy?” Ruysdale asked in her flat, businesslike voice.

  “Richard. Richard St. Germaine,” Chambrun said. He seemed to sink deeper into his chair. “We live with violence and terrorism all around us today. The Arab-Israeli thing; the Olympic games last year, the letter bombs; the Mafia killings in our own streets. We cry out against it; it’s evil, vicious, uncivilized. And yet—” he took a deep drag on his cigarette and let the smoke out in a long, curling stream—“and yet thirty years ago, in the dark days, we practiced it and we thought it righteous and heroic. I saw Claude St. Germaine hanging from a lamppost outside the Nazi military headquarters in Paris and I felt good about it.” The corner of Chambrun’s mouth twitched. “I had given the orders for it, I helped with the actual deed, and, God help me, I felt good about it.”

  “What had he done?” Shelda asked. It was almost a whisper.

  Chambrun looked at her. “There were two kinds of enemy in those days,” he said. “There were the German soldiers and the Nazi SS men; and there were the collaborators, Frenchmen who helped the Germans turn our whole country into a prison camp. We hated the German soldiers and SS men, but they were men under orders; they wore uniforms we could recognize, they were armed and ready to kill us, and we fought each other, fighting, hiding, sniping, hiding again. Somehow it was a decent fight, even though they were animals!” He crushed out his cigarette in the copper ash tray on his desk and took a fresh one from his case and lit it. I thought his voice shook a little as he went on. “But the collaborators! They were civilians like us, Frenchmen like us, and yet they served the enemy, eagerly, willingly. They betrayed their countrymen; they allowed their homes, their money, their prewar friendships, to be used against their own people. Claude St. Germaine was one of them. He gave magnificent parties for them in his great house on the Avenue Kleber. He sat in their councils. Publicly he appeared to be a Frenchman grieving for his motherland; he even approached us and gave us bits of information which would presumably help us. The big parties, he told us, were given against his will. He was helpless. Following tips we got from him, we countered one or two minor Nazi plots. We came to trust him. And then he let us on to a big event. Hitler himself was to visit the house on the Avenue Kleber. St. Germaine showed us how we could get into the house through the sewers and old wine cellars under the house. He drew maps for us. He provided us with duplicated keys. Twenty of our best men went to the house the night Hitler was supposed to be there. I would have been there myself except for the mischance of a badly sprained ankle which limited my mobility. Our twenty saboteurs would destroy the house and assassinate Hitler and his top people—except that it was a trap carefully set up by the Nazis with the aid of St. Germaine. All twenty men were caught in a center room and slaughtered. They were most of our key men, our best men, and St. Germaine had contrived to eliminate them and almost break the backbone of our movement, of the Resistance itself. That was how I, at twenty-two, became one of the leaders. Our top men had all been killed in ten minutes of bloody horror.” Chambrun was silent for a moment, and then he went on. “The first order I gave was that St. Germaine should be hanged like a common murderer—which is what he was—and his body displayed so that all collaborators should know what was in store for them. It took a month to trap him. It took five minutes to try him in a kangaroo court. It took another five minutes to hang him by the neck until he was dead. It took a diversionary action to distract attention from the front of the Avenue Kleber house, and while the Germans and the collaborating police were chasing us down back alleys three of us hung St. Germaine’s body on a lamppost at the front for all the world to see. It seemed, as I said, just and fair and even heroic. Man’s morality depends on where he sits, on his perspective, on his personal emotions. We saw what we had done as right and proper. Richard Cleaves sees us as villains.”

  “But he was only five years old, you said,” Ruysdale said.

  Chambrun’s smile was bitter. “Psychiatrists and analysts are getting rich on the indelible memories we have of what happened to us when we were five years old—even younger.”

  “Where did the name Cleaves come from?” I asked.

  Chambrun shrugged. It is the only Gallic mannerism he has. “The war was over, the Germans were gone. Collaboration was forgotten or forgiven. People had been under terrible pressure, everyone said. St. Germaine’s widow married an Englishman named Harrison Cleaves, a shipping magnate. The boy, St. Germaine’s son Richard, took his stepfather’s name. According to George Battle he hasn’t forgotten what happened to his father and has spent his adult life hating us and dreaming of retribution in some fashion.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “You said at the start that that afraid-of-his-own-shadow creep upstairs had paid for the rope that hanged St. Germaine.”

  “You must learn not to judge a package by its wrapping, Mark,” Chambrun said. “George Battle is afraid of germs, he’s afraid of public transportation—yes, he’s afraid of his own shadow. But mostly he’s afraid of vengeance.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “You don’t get to be a multi-billionaire by kissing babies,” Chambrun said. “George was born rich, but only modestly rich. He turned a minor fortune into a colossus of wealth and power by being one of the toughest, most devious, most ruthless men alive today. What lies behind him is a path strewn with the crippled and dead who got in the way of his gigantic steam roller. What George fears most is that someone who survived may try to even what to him is a small and meaningless score.”

  “You said he ‘paid for the rope,’” I persisted. “If he helped you, he evidently supported some good causes.”

  “If what we did was a good cause,” Chambrun said.

  “Did he support the Resistance?”

  “Yes. With money, with arms made in other countries, with influence he could bring to bear in other parts of the world.”

  “So his impulses were good.”

  Chambrun smiled that bitter smile. “Perhaps they were good, certainly they paid off.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “There were hundreds of men in a restored France who felt they owed him a debt. He made a great, great deal of money out of their gratitude.”

  “He gave you the management of the Beaumont, and the penthouse,” Ruysdale said. “He must have owed you something.”

  I wouldn’t have dared say such a thing. Chambrun looked at her as though he was pleased she’d had the courage.

  “He owes me his life,” Chambrun said. “I’ve saved it at least twice. It seems I’m to be required to save it again.”

  “Then you owe him something,” Ruysdale said.

  “He paid for the rope,” Chambrun said.

  “There is one thing, Mr. Chambrun,” Shelda said.

  “Yes?”

  “It couldn’t have been Richard Cleaves who fired that shot at Mr. Battle tonight. I was with him when it happened.”

  “With him!” I said.

  “I had dinner with David Loring,” Shelda said, ignoring me. “The other guests were Angela Adams and Mr. Cleaves. We were all together at the time the attack on Mr. Battle was made.”

  Chambrun nodded, a faraway look in his eyes. “The finger that squeezes the trigger isn’t necessarily attached to the brain that plans the action,” he said.

  We had one piece of luck in that strange evening. The man assigned to the case by Homicide was Lieutenant Hardy, an old friend who’d been involved with us before. Hardy is a big, blond man who looks more like a professional football player than a detective. “Shaggy dog,” were Ruysdale’s words for him. He appeared to be a slow-moving, slow-thinking gent until you got to know him. The key to his success as a homicide man was thoroughness. He checks a
nd checks and double-checks every detail of a case. He never gives up, and he will follow every clue, no matter how tenuous, until it pays off or checks out. He doesn’t follow the most likely leads; he follows all the leads. You know, when he handles a case, that nothing will be overlooked. He and Chambrun have a mutual admiration society going. Chambrun, mercurial, jumps from mountain peak to mountain peak. Hardy follows, but by going down into the valley and climbing up the other side. He came into the office, looking a little ruffled but not really disturbed, just after Chambrun had made his remark about trigger fingers and detached brains. He might even have heard it from Ruysdale’s office.

  “So you’re at it again,” he said to Chambrun, “making work for me.” He gave the rest of us a casual salute.

  “Welcome to our city,” Chambrun said, grinning at him. “Have you been upstairs?”

  “Have I been upstairs!” Hardy said. He glanced at the Turkish coffeemaker on the sideboard, then at Ruysdale. “You don’t have any decent drinking coffee, do you, Miss Ruysdale?” He’d had experience with the thick, strong brew from the sideboard.

  “If you can drink instant,” Ruysdale said, and went off to her own office and her own equipment.

  Hardy sat down in a big armchair facing Chambrun’s desk. “I had a call from my great white father, the mayor, telling me that I must do everything possible to insure the safety of your great white father upstairs,” he said. “Trouble is I can’t talk to the only witness in the case. Your Mr. Battle saw the gunman, but it will be several hours before he comes out of the shot Dr. Cobb gave him. So while I waited I thought I’d come down and go over Jerry Dodd’s theory with you.”

  “That I was actually the target?” Chambrun asked.

  “Does it add up?” Hardy asked. He took a charred-looking black pipe from his pocket and began to fill it from an oilskin pouch. Chambrun didn’t answer till Hardy had his pipe going by way of a battered Zippo lighter.

  “It’s a theory,” Chambrun said.

  “You know someone who would like to do you in so elaborately?” Hardy asked. “I mean, there are twenty places in this hotel where it would be easier to get at you than that penthouse. And what luck he had, getting by three sentries, one bodyguard, and three other people bedded down in the place.”

  “Marvelous luck,” Chambrun said.

  The two of them smirked at each other like a couple of old biddies gossiping over the back fence. They enjoyed each other.

  “Mostly, when you ask a man if he knows someone who wants to kill him,” Hardy said, “he says ‘No’ or, ‘Well, there is this John Smith.’ I heard a name dropped as I came in; someone who couldn’t have done it.”

  “Richard Cleaves couldn’t have done it,” Chambrun said. “Shelda has provided him with an alibi.”

  Hardy glanced at Shelda. “Maybe she’s in love with him. Maybe his alibi won’t hold up. I’ll check it out.” He meant it as a joke and he clearly thought it was quite funny.

  “Let’s get serious, friend, because it’s going to be a long night,” Chambrun said. “A man like George Battle has enemies all around the globe. It’s very unpopular these days to be as rich as George Battle is.”

  “You don’t get that way by passing out free liquor,” Hardy said.

  “Thirty years ago I had enemies,” Chambrun said, his voice gone cold. “I lived for a good many years expecting to meet an assassin down some dark corridor. It never happened. Tonight I find that the son of a man I had killed thirty years ago—who was five years old at the time—is a guest in the hotel. This man has a reason to hate George Battle, who was an ally of mine thirty years ago. But he didn’t fire the shot that lodged in the headboard of my bed. He was having what I hope was an intellectual conversation about films with Shelda.”

  “But as you said as I was coming in, he could have arranged to have it fired. That’s the fashion of the day. You can get a man killed today for a very few dollars.”

  “There are undoubtedly a great many people,” Chambrun said, by-passing Hardy’s comment, “who have come to hate me quite a lot over the years I have run this hotel. There are people whose credit I’ve cut off, there are the wives of double-crossing husbands I’ve covered for, there are mobsters who have tried to look respectable by registering here and who got kicked out by me, and there are perhaps three dozen widely assorted employees—ex-employees: waiters, bartenders, chefs, housemaids, bell boys, cleaning people, office help whom I’ve fired for slovenly work or for trying to steal from me. Murderous hatred? I doubt it. Of course somebody could have blown his stack.”

  “So you don’t think with Jerry that it was meant for you?”

  “It could have been,” Chambrun said.

  “But you think it’s more likely it was meant for Battle?”

  Chambrun watched the smoke curl up from his cigarette.

  “There are some interesting questions for you to answer, Lieutenant,” he said. “If it was meant for George why, after managing to get past the sentries, the bodyguard, Dr. Cobb and the two servants, did our killer only fire one shot that missed? Jerry guesses a thirty-eight police special. He could have fired four, five shots. Why didn’t he go on shooting when he saw he had missed?”

  “Maybe he had only one shell in the gun.”

  “Plan so carefully and come unprepared?”

  “Maybe he just wanted to scare Battle,” Hardy said.

  “Run all those risks just to scare him?” Chambrun shook his head. “Let me tell you one thing about George Battle. He has allowed people to believe that he is a timid, frightened man. He’s helped to create that belief. But when it comes to real danger, he’s got the guts of a burglar. Maybe that isn’t quite accurate, come to think of it. Maybe it’s that he’s so afraid of dying that he will run any kind of risk to stay alive.”

  “Maybe it was just meant as a warning,” Hardy said.

  “Quite possible. Even probably,” Chambrun said.

  “But was it meant for you or was it meant for Battle?”

  “Let’s consider something unrelated to that question,” Chambrun said. “The elevator to the penthouse was restricted to people okayed by Battle. The fire stairs were bolted on the inside. He couldn’t have come over the roof. I’ve said I’d trust Jerry and his men with my life.”

  Hardy’s eyes widened. “Are you saying nobody got into the penthouse from outside?”

  “I’m asking the question,” Chambrun said.

  Hardy stood up abruptly. “So he may be up there right now with the guy who took a shot at him.”

  “He should be safe enough with all your crew up there,” Chambrun said. “But if I were you, Lieutenant, I’d certainly like to talk to Butler, the bodyguard, Allerton, the manservant, Gaston, the chef—and Dr. Cobb. And George, when he comes to.”

  Hardy left quickly for a big man.

  It had come a little fast for me to take in. “You’re just trying to get him off your back,” I said. “You don’t believe for a minute one of those four guys took a shot at Battle. They’re the people he trusts.”

  “Judas was also trusted,” Chambrun said.

  Four

  IN THEORY THE PEOPLE who work for the Beaumont are committed to silence about anything that goes wrong with its routines. A violence can be the beginning of a kind of panic if the word spreads among our hundreds of transient guests. Get hundreds of people making hysterical inquiries at the switchboard and our whole telephone system is disrupted; dozens of people will want to check out at once, jamming up our front desk and our bookkeeping department, demanding to get their precious belongings out of our safety deposit boxes. It can generate a madhouse that will continue long after whatever the trouble is has been cleared up.

  Perhaps it was asking too much that the attack on George Battle could have been kept a secret. The lobby, normally quiet at ten o’clock at night, had still been crowded with ladies hoping to get a glimpse of David Loring. The police had not sneaked into the hotel when they came. Ten minutes after they arrived,
the word had spread like a forest fire. There was no time or reason to check out who had started the story going. Dozens of people on the staff knew that George Battle was in the penthouse and that extraordinary precautions were being taken to protect him, and when those precautions broke down, so did any secrecy about it. The minute the story was out, literally hundreds of reporters, photographers, and feature writers from the press, radio, and television were storming the hotel. Someone had to deal with them, and that turned out to be my job.

  It was after one o’clock in the morning when I finally found myself facing the news corps in one of the private dining rooms on the main floor. They weren’t a happy family. They’d been kept without any information for a couple of hours. All they had was rumor.

  I made a short statement. “Someone broke into the penthouse where Mr. Battle is staying and took a shot at him. The shot missed. Mr. Battle is unhurt, though in shock and unable to make a statement. As yet the police haven’t identified the gunman. He apparently got away in the immediate confusion that followed the firing of the shot. That’s all I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen.”

  It wasn’t enough.

  “We understand special precautions were being taken to protect Mr. Battle. Why?”

  “The precautions were not special for a man of Mr. Battle’s importance,” I said.

  “Sentries on the roof, an armed guard outside his bedroom door; that isn’t special?”

  The word was certainly out. “Not special,” I said

  “He expected some kind of attack?”

  I tried to keep it light. “Not the kind that happened. He expected some of you people might go to any lengths to get an interview with him. He was tired. He wanted to get some sleep.”

  “Why don’t you level with us, Haskell?” It was a young reporter from the News whom I knew well. “We know Battle lives in fear of his life—the way he travels, the constant protection. What instructions did the sentries and the bodyguard really have?”