“I’m sorry, madam. I didn’t realize—”
“Realize that this is no laughing matter, Mr. Duval,” she said.
“I wouldn’t waste time, Claude,” Henri said. “I’ll call the airport and arrange a seat for you. Diplomatic pressure. With the time difference you can be back at your studio first thing in the morning.”
“The whole thing is pure idiocy,” Duval said. “But— I’ll make the five o’clock flight.”
The phone went dead.
Chambrun gave Latrobe a thin smile. “You were first rate, Henri,” he said.
“I take particular pleasure in making trouble for that genius,” Henri said. “He’s been demanding outrageous favors from my government for twenty years—ever since he became The Great One in motion pictures.”
“If he stops to look at the rushes of the film they shot here,” Mrs. Haven said, “he’ll know that I am lying in my teeth. I’m obviously not in any of the film they shot because I wasn’t in either place.”
“He can look at the rushes until he’s cross-eyed,” Chambrun said. “He won’t know whether you’re in them or not because he doesn’t know what you look like.”
“How lucky for him,” the old lady said, with a touch of bitterness.
“My dear Victoria, I find you beautiful and irresistible,” Chambrun said.
“I, too, find you that,” Henri said. He reached out—to take her hand, a kissing of the fingers in the offing. Toto snarled at him.
Chambrun leaned back in his desk chair, still smiling. “So we have about six hours to wait,” he said.
“He didn’t seem to resist the idea of coming here,” I said. “Maybe he doesn’t care whether you see him or not.”
“I think he won’t expect me to be here,” Chambrun said.
I didn’t realize until later exactly what he meant by that.
THREE
MAYBE I DIDN’T WANT to know what he meant. But about ten thirty he made it quite clear to others as well as me. Ruysdale, Jerry Dodd, and Hardy were gathered with him when I answered a summons that reached me out in the “circulating area.”
Chambrun, dinner jacketed, was sitting at his desk when I arrived, sipping at a glass of white wine poured over shaved ice, his usual evening drink. He didn’t look relaxed, though. His eyes were very bright, and he kept turning the wine glass round and round in his fingers.
“The whole thing is based on pure fantasy, made out of something lighter than air,” he said. “It begins on a supposition based on almost nothing. I was abducted from my penthouse, apparently to keep me from seeing someone. It happens that I never saw Claude Duval.”
“Or several hundred other people,” Hardy said, “whom you can’t even name.”
“Humor me, Walter,” Chambrun said. “Poor Shirley Thomas is asking questions about Laura Kauffman. She’s asking those questions on the telephone from her apartment. She isn’t facing anyone with awkward questions, yet somebody comes to her apartment and puts an end to it. It so happens one of the people she talked to was Claude Duval.”
“She talked to a mechanical answering service,” Hardy said.
“Duval says. In my fantasy she talked to him. Now, we have considered the likelihood of an ‘employer’ with a hired professional strong-arm man who is also—an expert at locks. Shirley asks a dangerous question and Duval, who is the ‘employer’ in my dream, gets in touch with his professional who is here in New York, and half an hour later Shirley is dead.”
“If I were to act on this kind of fantasy,” Hardy said, “they’d have my gun and badge and I’d be locked up in a state mental hospital for observation.”
“But I don’t have a gun or a badge to lose, Walter,” Chambrun said, “and I’m not responsible to anyone but myself for my dreams.”
“So dream on,” Hardy said.
“Chester Cole told Mark that Duval didn’t know Laura Kauffman. Laura went to his suite to talk about the ball, Cole was there, and he’s certain they didn’t know each other. I permit myself the luxury of dreaming that they did know each other. She was living in Paris in the black days of the Nazi occupation. He is a Frenchman and is old enough to have been living then. In my fantasy, they knew each other but didn’t reveal the fact in Cole’s presence. Later Laura gets in touch with Duval, or he gets in touch with her. He goes to see her. She is a blackmailer and she tries it on for size. Either Duval blows his stack and puts an end to her himself, or he goes away and sends for his professional hit-man to do the job for him.”
“Invent me a piece of evidence, chum, out of your whole cloth,” Hardy said.
“Patience, Walter, I’m about to do just that. It is all fantasy, all nonsense—or it can be true,” Chambrun said. “If it is true, there are certain things we can expect. Duval, we know, is due to arrive at Kennedy at one o’clock. He should reach the Beaumont not later than one thirty. If my dream, to mix a metaphor, will hold water, and it was dangerous for me to see him when he was here for the ball, then it would still be dangerous.”
“In your dream, why are you so goddamned dangerous to him?” Hardy asked. He was irritated, almost angry with his friend.
“I haven’t the faintest idea, Walter,” Chambrun said, smiling. “But he risked the possibility of having to murder me, risked a kidnapping charge to remove me from the hotel. That makes me really dangerous.”
“It’s still pure fantasy that Duval is your ‘employer.’ ”
“I like the word ‘pure,’ ” Chambrun said. “No proof, but I believe it for the moment I intend to try to prove it before he gets here.”
“How?”
“By going to bed early,” Chambrun said, and sipped his wine.
“Oh, for God sake, Pierre!” Hardy said. “Stop wasting our time.”
Chambrun lit one of his flat Egyptian cigarettes. “If it was so dangerous for me to see Duval two days ago it is still equally dangerous. So I will make a public point of going to bed early. If I am right, I will have a visitor sometime before Duval arrives.”
“A visitor?”
“A man who understands locks and who carries a .44 handgun,” Chambrun said.
“You think that creep will pay you a second visit?” Jerry Dodd asked.
“If any of this fantasy is for real,” Chambrun said, “I think he will. At the best—for me, that is—I must be occupied when Duval visits the hotel. At the worst—for me—I had better be dead, out of the way permanently. Whatever the decision, I think he will almost certainly try to get to me. So, I will ‘go to bed early,’ try to make it easy for him.”
“Make it easy?” Jerry asked.
“He got into the penthouse once. He knows how,” Chambrun said. “The difference this time is that I’ll be expecting him.”
“I should have my head examined,” Hardy said, “but we’ll all be waiting for him. But why not here, Pierre? We can protect you a great deal better here; cover the elevators, the corridor outside, Miss Ruysdale’s office.”
“Does it occur to you, Walter, that if I am obviously protected he may, in desperation, take a long shot at me from somewhere. That’s too hard to guard against. I want to make it easy for him. I don’t want him to dream for a moment that I expect him.”
“So he lets himself into the penthouse and blasts away at you with his .44,” Hardy said.
“I think not,” Chambrun said. “I think not while I am warned and ready.”
“How can we warn you?” I asked. “We can cover every entrance to the hotel and not know when he walks in. We don’t know what he looks like! He won’t come charging into the lobby wearing his ski mask!”
I should have known he had it carefully planned. He would go to the penthouse. He would begin to play music on his stereo, as he always did. The elevators to the roof and the roof itself would be left unguarded. Hardy, and whatever extra men he wanted, would be waiting on the floor below the roof level.
“But I will be warned when he reaches the roof level,” Chambrun said.
“How?”
; Chambrun gave us a delighted grin. “By a little dog who will bark his head off at any intruder,” Chambrun said. “Victoria Haven has agreed to let Toto loose on the roof the moment I’m in the penthouse. That little bastard will be better than a burglar alarm as soon as a stranger enters his domain.”
“You’re kidding!” Hardy said.
“Toto will be as predictable and precise as an electric eye,” Chambrun said. “His whole life is devoted to protecting Victoria from strangers—even friends. He will warn me, and I will be waiting just inside the penthouse door for my visitor.”
“The only reason I buy it,” Hardy said, “is that the whole thing simply isn’t going to happen.”
“There is one other very important part to my plan,” Chambrun said. “I think it falls to you, Jerry. I want the plane from Los Angeles to be met at Kennedy. You’ll have no difficulty spotting this Telly Savalas type getting off the plane. I think the first thing he will do is head for a telephone.”
“Why?” Jerry asked.
“He will be calling his man, his professional, his killer, to make sure his mission is accomplished. I am dead, I am silenced, I will not be here at the Beaumont to confront him. But if we have been successful on this end, Duval won’t be able to reach his man. What he does then is important for us to know. Will he risk coming here anyway? Will he take flight? Will he try to arrange with Mrs. Haven to meet her somewhere else? We mustn’t lose him, Jerry.”
“That’s a job for cops. I want to stay here by you,” Jerry said.
“I appreciate that, friend,” Chambrun said. “But cops look like cops. I don’t want to scare him off.”
“But he may recognize me,” Jerry said. “I was on stage, you might say, during the ball.”
“Then you just walk up to him and say the hotel sent you to make sure he had no problems getting to Mrs. Haven. You’ll have your own car. A special courtesy, arranged by Mrs. Haven.” Chambrun’s smile was wry. “The Beaumont is famous for special courtesies.”
I found out then what my part in this charade was to be. I was to spend the rest of the evening with Mrs. Haven in her penthouse.
“She is an extraordinary woman, Mark,” Chambrun said. “She is also a very loyal friend. If she thought something was going wrong, she might try to get into the act. You’re to see to it that she doesn’t. Just stay with her, see that she lets Toto out onto the roof, and nothing else. When Toto warns us, as I believe he will, just stay put and see to it that Victoria stays put.”
Jerry grinned at me. “You think you can handle an eighty-year-old doll?” he asked.
“I’m not at all sure,” I said.
“You and your men, Walter, will be in a suite on the floor below,” Chambrun said. “Mark will alert you the minute Toto warns us. You will stay there, however, until he warns you a second time.”
“A second time?” I asked.
“If all of the lights don’t go on in my penthouse within ten minutes of Toto’s alarm, it will probably mean that I’ve failed,” Chambrun said. “If they do go on, it means I’ve got him. Either way it will be time for the marines.”
At about eleven thirty Mrs. Haven greeted me at the door of her penthouse. She was wearing a wine-red, tentlike housecoat, a drink in one hand and her long jade cigarette holder in the other. Toto growled at me from his satin cushion.
“A pretty dull prospect for you, Mark,” she said. “Spending the evening with the ancient wreck of a woman. I can remember—well, never mind what I can remember. Drink?”
I thought a bourbon on the rocks would be a nice idea.
She weaved her way through the piles of junk in her living room to a little portable bar in a far corner and made me my drink.
“Thank goodness it’s not raining,” she said. “If it was raining, Toto would be no use.”
“Oh?”
“He’ll prowl around on the roof forever,” she said. “But if it rains, he’ll be clawing at the door, paying no attention to anything but getting in.”
“There’s a bright moon and stars,” I said.
“Do we let him out now?” she asked.
I walked over to the window facing Chambrun’s penthouse and pulled aside the heavy drapes enough to peek out. Just then dim lights popped on across the way. Chambrun was there.
“I guess it’s now,” I said.
Mrs. Haven picked up the little dog from his satin cushion and kissed him right on his pug nose. “Now you go out, darling,” she said. “Have fun, and keep away any naughty people.”
A bright red tongue licked her wrinkled cheek. She carried him to the door and let him out.
“Now we wait,” Mrs. Haven said. “How long, do you think?”
“Who knows?” I said.
Her pale old eyes were narrowed with concern. “Pierre is too old to be playing games like this,” she said; “I should have refused him, only he would have gone on just the same without my help.”
“He’s not an easy man to say ‘no’ to,” I said. “As for being too old, he’s in his fifties. Prime of life, he calls it.”
“He is fifty-eight, by my reckoning,” she said. “I first knew him thirty-five years ago during what he calls ‘the black days’ in Paris. He was a wild young man with the heart of a lion back then. He was better up to confronting psychotic killers in those days. But now?” She looked down at her wrinkled hand and suddenly put it out of sight in the pocket of her robe. “The body doesn’t respond to the impulses of the mind after a while, Mark.”
“But the mind can outthink the opposition—I hope,” I said.
“The place is swarming with police. Why doesn’t he leave it to them?”
“We don’t know who we’re looking for,” I said. “We have to bait a trap for him.”
“With Pierre as bait?” she asked. “I don’t like it, Mark.”
“Like I said, he’s a hard man to say ‘no’ to.”
Smoke swirled around her hennaed hair from the cigarette in her holder. She was looking away from me, toward the past, I thought.
“I once said ‘no’ to him, and lived to regret it.” She turned her head and caught me smiling. “Oh, not what you think, Mark. There’s no way, by any magic, to make me anything less than twenty-five years older than Pierre—at any time that I’ve known him. He was twenty-three when I first met him, I was forty-eight. Had he not been so young he might have guessed that at forty-eight I could have been a pretty sensational sex partner. I think I was at my best then. And, he was too busy destroying and killing Nazis. He didn’t need what I had to offer then to prove his manhood. In a life that has known romance I have regretted that.” She sighed. “But later he offered me friendship, and that I cherish. That’s why I’m sitting here with you waiting for Toto to tell us something.”
“But you said ‘no’ to him about something else?”
Talk was the best way to pass time. From the moment Victoria Haven had put that nasty little spaniel out onto the roof I’d felt tensions growing in me until they were almost unbearable. I listened to this nice old woman, going on in her hoarse, whiskey voice, but most of all I listened for some sound of protest from Toto. I glanced at my watch every two or three minutes. It was almost midnight. If the “professional” was coming ahead of Duval, it would have to be relatively soon.
“He asked me, once, a long time ago, to help a man who was in desperate trouble,” Mrs. Haven said, looking back again. “I am very well off, Mark. I’ve always been lucky enough to have a great deal of money. Pierre, at the time, had just begun his career here at the Beaumont and he had no more than a modestly good salary. I said ‘no’ because I didn’t like the man he wanted me to help. I didn’t like him because he was German, and we had just suffered too much from Germans in those days.”
I was only half listening. Would I hear that bloody little dog when he barked? If he barked!
“You can imagine this is all very vivid to me right now,” Mrs. Haven said, “when I tell you that the man was the Baron von Holtzmann, Lau
ra Kauffman’s husband at the time. You may know that he committed suicide. If I had been willing to help—who knows?”
That jolted me. “You knew her back then? You knew him?”
She nodded. “I had no use for her. She was a collaborator with the Nazis. In my book, Mark, she got what she deserved here the other night. Von Holtzmann was just another German to me. Pierre told me he had actually been fighting the Nazis, helping the Resistance. I chose not to put much stock in that. He was German! Like most of Laura’s men he lived off her money. Hemmerly steel. When he left her, for whatever reason, he was without funds and I gather deeply in debt. He borrowed from what Pierre described as loan sharks. He had to pay, or else. He chose his own way out. I was sorry, then, that I’d refused Pierre. I should have trusted his judgment. I always have since then. That’s why—”
She didn’t finish. From out on the roof came the high, shrill barking of the little spaniel.
I had my instructions. I reached for the phone. Miss Kiley, on the switchboard, was waiting for my signal.
“Hardy,” I said to her.
Seconds later Hardy answered.
“The dog,” I said to him.
“I have fourteen minutes past twelve,” Hardy said. “In ten minutes I come up whether you call or not. See anything?”
“Chambrun told me not to part the drapes, not to show a light from here,” I said. “In ten minutes—”
Mrs. Haven was on her feet, a hand resting on my shoulder. She was trembling. I held out my left arm and we both watched the second hand on my watch drag its way around the dial. A minute, two minutes, three minutes.
“I can’t stand this,” the old woman said. “Let’s go to him.” She picked up a handbag from the table and, to my surprise, produced a small, pearl-handled revolver.
“I gave my word we’d both stay put for a full ten minutes,” I said.
The dog was still barking, angrily. I think we both expected the next thing we’d hear was the sound of a gunshot. At twenty-one minutes past twelve I opened the drapes a slit. All the lights were on in Chambrun’s penthouse.
I grabbed up the phone again and told Hardy. Then I ran out onto the roof. The little spaniel made a grab at my trouser leg as I ran past him at the door. I sensed that Mrs. Haven was behind me, moving as fast as her ancient legs would carry her.
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