Nightmare Time

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Around three-thirty, I think. I know she planned to leave a call for seven-thirty, and I figured she’d get about four hours sleep.”

  “She may never have gotten home,” Jerry said. “Bastards picked her up out on the street.”

  “So help me,” Chambrun said in a shaken voice, “if they have hurt her—!” And he pounded down the desk again with his fists, making the coffee mug I’d brought him bounce.

  “You’re going to have to tell Lieutenant Hardy,” Jerry said.

  “This isn’t a homicide yet,” Chambrun said. “I’ve got to think—”

  “About turning the boy loose?” Jerry asked.

  “You want to turn me loose?” It was Guy Willis, standing in the doorway, rubbing at his sleep-swollen eyes.

  “Damn!” Chambrun muttered. He hadn’t wanted to tell the boy, not yet, at any rate. “He has to know, Mark.”

  I picked up the threatening note from the desk where Chambrun had dropped it and carried it over to the boy. He read it, his eyes widening.

  “They’ve hurt Betsy?” he asked.

  “That’s all we know at the moment,” I said, indicating the note.

  “I don’t understand,” Guy said.

  Chambrun turned in his chair, fighting for control. His voice was almost gentle as he spoke to the boy. “It’s like an old joke, Guy—‘I have good news for you and bad news.’ The good news is that your father is still alive, still unwilling to tell them what they want to know. The bad news is that if they tried to use your mother to get him to talk, they failed. Their last chance is to get you to him, threaten you with bodily harm, in the hope that will break your father down. To prevent that is why you’re here, with Betsy and Mark to guard you along with Mr. Dodd’s security force.”

  “So—so they’ve got Betsy and are threatening to harm her unless you surrender me to them?” Guy asked.

  “Something like that,” Chambrun said.

  “Well—of course, you have to,” the boy said.

  Chambrun stared at him as though he couldn’t believe what he’d heard.

  “You can’t let them use Betsy, who doesn’t even know my dad more than to say hello to, to force Dad to give them what they want. I’m the one that should have to face it—whatever it is.”

  “Look, kiddo, I don’t think you quite understand—” Jerry began.

  “Dad wouldn’t want me to hide behind a woman’s skirt,” Guy said.

  “I think we all need to face the situation as it really is,” Chambrun said. He took a sip from the mug of coffee I’d brought him. “It’s very grim, Guy, and very black. You ready for it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your father has information these people have already committed one murder to try to get—Tim Sullivan. They hoped to use your mother as a means of making your father talk. It hasn’t worked, we can only hope not for the very worst reason. Then they tried to get you, using the priest. Now I’ve got you where they can’t get you. So they snatch Ruysdale to force my hand.”

  “So let them have me, sir,” young Guy said. “It’s the Willises’ problem, not yours or Betsy’s.”

  “But think in terms of the blackest kind of villainy, boy, if you can,” Chambrun said. “Your father and mother can identify these people if they ever get free. They’ll keep your father alive because only he can give them the information they want so badly. Your mother?” Chambrun’s shoulders moved in a little shrug. “Now they’ve got Betsy. Will they free her if I meet their demand and set you loose? She could identify some of them, so she can’t win. They’ll keep her alive as long as they think they can use her to make me give in, turn you over to them. After that they won’t dare let her go. Your father is alive, but he must know that whether he talks or not there’s no hope for him in the end. As long as I don’t set you free, Guy, there’s a chance that all of them—your dad, mother, and Betsy—will be kept alive. So we keep you safe here and we have just a little while in which we can hope to catch up with them.”

  The boy’s lips trembled. “I thought you said the brooch meant that Rozzie had taken the poison.”

  “Or been prevented from taking it,” Chambrun said. “If your father knew she’d killed herself, nothing on earth would persuade him to talk—unless it was you. If your mother is alive, and they start to torture you in front of her, she might persuade your father to talk.”

  “And even if he did you’d all be dead ducks,” Jerry Dodd said. “None of you would ever be let go to identify them to the top brass.”

  “That’s the way it is, boy,” Chambrun said. “They’ll give us a little time to figure out what our chances are, probably threaten us again, maybe put Betsy on the phone to ask me for help. Then, if I do turn you loose you’re all dead, and if I don’t all but you are dead.”

  “I’d want to go with them,” Guy said.

  “But if I keep you here, protected, it will give us some time—hours, a day—to find some answers and stage a rescue. Cooperate with us, boy. It’s the one chance there is for your parents and Betsy.”

  The boy hesitated, drew a deep breath. “Yes sir. I’ll do whatever you say.”

  IN RETROSPECT it’s hard for me to remember the exact sequence of events in the next little stretch of time. Some of them I was in on, some of them I heard about later.

  One of our basic problems, as Jerry Dodd pointed out to Chambrun, was manpower. Still playing with Chambrun’s theory that the Willises and, possibly now, Betsy were being cleverly hidden in the hotel, moved to safety areas after they’d been searched, Jerry pointed out that we’d need the National Guard to help keep those searched places covered so they couldn’t be used again. You could close the hotel, check everybody out, then send in the army. But that was a process that would take hours.

  We probably didn’t have hours. In the course of such an elaborate move the people holding the Willises and Betsy would be alerted, move with the tide, and disappear. We needed every bit of possible help we could get, and that dictated the necessity of letting Hardy and Captain Zachary in on what had happened to Betsy. That would give us police help and the special knowledge of the armed services intelligence know-how. I was given the job of informing those two potential allies what was cooking while Chambrun and Jerry went around the corner to Betsy’s apartment to see for themselves if there was any sort of clue that might help. I don’t think Chambrun would have left the hotel in a crisis for any other reason in the world than to help someone as precious to him as Betsy. I didn’t believe there was any other such person.

  Chambrun had one fresh piece of information before he and Jerry set out for Betsy’s apartment. Betsy had told me she was “going to leave a call” for seven-thirty so she could relieve me at eight. There was no special phone service in the little brownstone where she had her apartment, and so the call was left at the Beaumont’s switchboard. Ora Veach, the chief operator on duty in the early morning, called Betsy every workday at seven. This time there had been a message not to call her till seven-thirty. Ora Veach informed Chambrun that there’d been no answer when the switchboard called at seven-thirty.

  “I figured her routine habits had wakened her before we called,” Ora told The Man. “Probably in the bathroom and didn’t hear the phone. We tried twice more in the next ten minutes. No luck. I’m sorry, Mr. Chambrun, but I didn’t think there was any reason to be alarmed. Habit had waked her ahead of time and she was probably on her way over here.”

  If she was ever at home at all, Chambrun thought. Jerry Dodd’s notion that Betsy had been picked up on her way home was eating at him. It was less than a block from the hotel, a well-lighted street, but deserted at three-thirty in the morning.

  There is no doorman or any visible help in the brownstone where Betsy lived. The superintendent cares for several buildings in the area. It didn’t surprise Jerry that Chambrun had a key to the front door of the building and another to Betsy’s apartment.

  “The apartment was neat as a pin,” Jerry told me a little later. “B
ed made, not even a coffee cup left on a table. I was satisfied that Betsy never got there after she left the hotel.”

  Chambrun was certain she had been there. “Out-of-character neat,” he told Jerry. “And the bed! Betsy didn’t make that bed.” He explained she had a special way of making the bed, the spread pulled up under the pillow, then doubled back out and up over the pillow. “As automatic as the way you brush your teeth,” Chambrun said. “Betsy never made the bed this time.”

  “Cleaning woman?” Jerry suggested.

  “Comes on Fridays—day after tomorrow,” Chambrun said. “Betsy was here, sleeping. Somehow they got to her.”

  “She had to let them in. There’s no sign the door was forced.”

  Chambrun nodded. “They’d have to ring the buzzer outside the front door to this building. Betsy answers. It’s someone she knows. Betsy presses the release button that lets them in downstairs, and opens up for them when they get here.”

  “At four in the morning?”

  “Someone claims they have a message from me.”

  “Would she buy that? You’d phone her, wouldn’t you?”

  “The way things were boiling at the hotel? In any case, Betsy was flimflammed by someone she knew. I’m guessing there was some kind of physical struggle when Betsy discovered she’d been had, place messed up. When they had her under control, they neatened it up, made the bed.”

  “Why?”

  “There are some men’s clothes in the closet, shaving equipment in the bathroom. A boyfriend might be turning up. They didn’t want us to know anything had happened to Betsy until they were ready for us to know.”

  “Betsy has a live-in boyfriend?”

  “She certainly does,” Chambrun said. “Me!”

  I don’t think Jerry was remotely surprised by the information, only that Chambrun had gone public with it.

  “If it was someone Betsy knew,” Jerry said, “then it almost certainly is someone you know.”

  “I haven’t missed that one, Jerry,” Chambrun said. “And I can promise you, if Betsy’s been hurt, he’s not going to be someone I know, but someone I knew!”

  While this was going on I was with Hardy and Zachary in Chambrun’s office at the Beaumont, bringing them up to date on what had happened to Betsy. They reacted differently. Hardy had come to know Betsy over the years, trusted her, had probably come to like her. He acted as any normal man would to the threat of danger to a friend. To Zachary, however, Betsy was just another piece on the chessboard of a game he was playing. They make a move, we make a move. Until now it seemed to me they had made all the moves.

  “I’ve thought from the beginning Chambrun should let the boy go,” Zachary said. “We cover him and are taken right to where they’re holding Major Willis. Now, it seems, they’ve forced his hand.”

  “Doesn’t it occur to you that if they get the boy to his father the classified information you care so much about will be gone?”

  “Not if we’re right there behind the boy,” Zachary said.

  “Can you guarantee that?” Hardy asked.

  “Can you guarantee anything in your job?” Zachary countered. “In our kind of jobs we just have to play the best card we hold and hope.”

  “The best card we hold is the boy—kept out of their reach,” Hardy said.

  “Look, Lieutenant,” Zachary said, anger darkening his face. “In your job you want to find a man and punish him for a crime. If you fail, you fail. In my job I’m trying to save a whole nation from disaster. If I fail, that whole nation may go down the drain. Would I risk one eleven-year-old kid for a chance to win? You’re damn right I would, and so would you if you’d think about it for a minute.”

  Hardy didn’t react one way or the other. His face was chiseled out of stone. “Who is with the boy now?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Haven—Victoria Haven,” I said.

  Hardy nodded.

  “Who is Mrs. Haven?” Zachary asked.

  It would have taken a whole book to answer that question. Victoria Haven is the eighty-odd-year-old widow lady who owns and lives in Penthouse Number Two on the roof. She is a tall, still handsome ex-show girl, several times divorced or widowed, with hair dyed a color of red that even God never invented. She lives alone except for what she calls “my Japanese gentleman friend,” a nasty-tempered little black-and-white Japanese spaniel. Her penthouse is wildly disordered, a storehouse for mementos from a long and exciting life.

  “It looks like disorder,” Chambrun once said to me, “but if you want the details of some important news story from fifty years ago, Victoria will just reach out and hand you the clipping. That disorder is complete order as far as she’s concerned.”

  “Chambrun’s so concerned about the kid’s safety,” Zachary said, “that he leaves an eighty-year-old woman to protect him?”

  “Mrs. Haven isn’t protecting Guy, any more than I was or Betsy. Rooftop security keeps anyone from getting up there without an okay from Chambrun or Jerry Dodd. Like Betsy and me, Mrs. Haven is just there to keep the boy company. Listen to anything he may have to say or may remember that might be useful. Lets him know that he isn’t alone and that there is someone who can reach Chambrun, the only person he really trusts.”

  “How very nice,” Zachary said, his voice a sour rasp. “You make sure a kid isn’t lonely, when, if properly used, he might lead us to a way to save this country from destruction by the enemy.”

  “Chambrun sees it another way,” I said. “Don’t risk letting the enemy use the boy, and your secrets are safe. Major Willis will never cave in under threats or physical torture to himself. Attack the boy in his presence and he just might—”

  “A stalemate,” Zachary said.

  “So neither side wins,” Hardy said. “Let’s keep it that way until we can figure out how to win.”

  The office door opened and Chambrun, a man looking dead on his feet, joined us.

  CHAMBRUN CAUGHT US up on what Betsy’s apartment had revealed. The main conclusion, as far as he was concerned, was that Betsy had let someone she knew and trusted into her apartment and had been double-crossed and betrayed.

  “It wouldn’t be some friend just interested in fun and games,” Hardy said. “Not at four or five o’clock in the morning.”

  “Not this day, not this particular morning,” Chambrun said.

  “Someone connected with hotel security, or the police,” Zachary said. “A bad apple in one of your barrels.”

  Chambrun ignored that comment as though he hadn’t heard it. There were no bad apples in his barrel. If he wasn’t sure of that he would have retired long ago.

  “You and Alexander Romanov were talking a while back about lists of possible enemy agents who might be staying here or be regular customers of the hotel,” he said to Zachary. “Make your list for me, please, Zachary.” Then, to me, “Mark, go to Romanov and ask for his list. Maybe between the two lists we’ll come up with someone that Betsy would know and trust. That would certainly be someone that I, too, would know and trust. If there’s such a name on either list, we may have a starting point.”

  “Don’t let Romanov know why you want the list,” Zachary said to me. “If you tell him he’ll know who to cover for.”

  “If he deserves your suspicions, Captain, he’ll know in advance why we want the list,” Chambrun said. “If he doesn’t deserve those suspicions, knowing why we want the list may head him in the right direction. Tell him, Mark.”

  I left the office, hearing Zachary muttering under his breath. He and Chambrun hadn’t buried the hatchet after all.

  From the outer office I called Romy Romanov’s room, and he answered promptly. I asked if I could come up and talk with him.

  “Coffee waiting for you,” he said. Which reminded me that I hadn’t had anything to eat since an early dinner the night before. My stomach was complaining.

  Romy was waiting in the open door of his room when I got there. I went in with him and found Pamela Smythe smiling at me from where she was p
erched in a corner of the couch across the room. She was wearing a nice-looking, pale-blue summer cotton dress—a little more formal than the last time I’d seen her, but not less attractive.

  I let them both know what had happened, with nothing held back. Romy exhibited some distress as the story unfolded. Pam Smythe listened, frowning.

  “I’ll make you a list,” Romy said when I’d finished. “It won’t be a big one—seven or eight names. It has to be people who know the hotel, who are familiar with Miss Ruysdale. She wouldn’t have let a complete stranger into her apartment, no matter what credentials he offered. Give me a few minutes to think.” He gave me a bitter little smile. “I suppose Zachary is sure I won’t give you any name that’ll be of any use to you.”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Chambrun doesn’t believe that?”

  “He’s asking for your help,” I said.

  Romy walked over to a desk in the corner of the room and sat down, pulling a pad of yellow legal paper toward him.

  “Coffee?” Pam Smythe asked, indicating a percolator that was plugged into a wall socket under a side table.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You wouldn’t have a piece of stale bread or an old sandwich somewhere? Breakfast seems to have gone by me.”

  Five minutes later I had coffee and a hearty ham sandwich. Romy was still scowling at his legal pad. Pam sat down beside me on the couch as I drank my coffee and ate my sandwich, grateful for both.

  “It’s a miserable world,” Pam said. “People everywhere, on both sides of the political fence, want peace. The people in charge, the leaders, want power. They try to persuade us that the only way to get the peace we want is to fight a war.”

  “It’s topsy-turvy time,” I said.

  “If there were no military secrets, no scientific or technological secrets, we could use what we know to make it a better world for everyone.” She made an impatient gesture. “Even our love lives are tainted by this sick thinking. The fact that Romy is a gifted, talented, kind, witty man doesn’t matter to my father. Romy is Russian, and all Russians are the enemy!”