“Be up as quickly as I can, Vicky. Sit tight.”
“Somebody get to the boy?” Hardy asked.
“No way,” Chambrun said.
“The young man’s notion of what a soldier and a gentleman should do in a crisis,” I said. “Betsy’s in terrible danger, Chambrun’s hotel is threatened with bombs. The only honorable thing for the Willises to do is face their own problems without involving friends.”
“A fairly sound code of ethics, except in this case,” Chambrun said. “Will you come up with me, Mark? I think you may rate just after God on the boy’s list of the trustworthy. You got me for him when I was needed. You might persuade him to change his mind if his feet get itchy again.”
If Chambrun could operate around the clock without any sleep, so could I, I thought.
“Give you a chance to do some thinking while we wait,” Hardy said to The Man.
“To hell with thinking,” Chambrun said. “What we need is just one solid fact to hook on to.”
“I’d think of going public with this whole story, every detail of it,” Hardy said. “You’d be astonished how often publicity and a reward offered will turn up someone who saw something.”
“Offer whatever reward you think is likely to produce results,” Chambrun said. “I’ll stand back of it. What about our phony Mr. Gary? Could he be tempted, do you think?”
“I’m afraid you’d be outbid by the other side, Pierre. Incidentally, Frank Gary isn’t a fake. He’s exactly what he says he is, native-born Italian named Francisco Garibaldi, brought to this country as a child, name changed, father in the cab business, he changing it to a limousine service. He is married. The fake is Father Paul Callahan, and I’m convinced Gary played that role. But getting him to talk, even with promises of immunity, isn’t likely. Once again, the other side can outbid us. But an honest person on the street who saw something, didn’t think it was important till he hears the whole story—well, we can hope.”
“What about the good old-fashioned third degree for Mr. Gary?” I asked.
“I’m afraid the third degree is pretty much a myth in modern police work,” Hardy said. “Sometimes I wish to God it wasn’t.”
THINGS SEEMED quiet enough in Chambrun’s penthouse, except that there was apparently no more gin rummy game in process. Victoria Haven was watching a coverage of the Beaumont story on television, outside shots of the hotel and crowds of people, an occasional interview with someone who’d been evacuated. Guy Willis sat by a far window, looking out at the city’s rooftops, apparently not interested in the TV excitement. He looked up quickly as Chambrun and I came in, then turned away again. Guilty as charged, I thought.
Victoria turned down the sound on the TV set. “I’m sorry to bring you up here at a time like this, Pierre,” she said. “It turns out I’m just an old woman giving advice to a man of the world. It just never occurred to me he’d try to go somewhere on his own. He’s made friends with Toto, who let him go across the roof without barking once.”
We walked over to the boy, who didn’t turn his head again even when Chambrun put a hand on his shoulder.
“Want to tell us what your plan was, Guy?” Chambrun asked.
The boy hunched up his shoulder as if to free himself from Chambrun’s touch. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry you didn’t trust me,” Chambrun said.
I realized the reason the boy didn’t look at us was that he was fighting that old problem of tears again.
“You scared the hell out of Mrs. Haven,” I said.
“She’s a very nice lady, and I—I’m sorry,” the boy said.
“You’re sorry, we’re sorry, but would you mind telling me what you had in mind?” Chambrun asked.
Then he faced us, eyes glistening, lips unsteady. “Betsy’s in danger and they’re threatening to blow up your hotel, sir. All because of me. I couldn’t let that happen to two people I care for. I knew the elevator wouldn’t take me down without an okay from you, sir, but I thought the fire stairs—”
“There are men there to keep people from getting up, but also from getting down,” Chambrun said.
“I found that out.”
“What was your plan if you made it?”
“I—I thought I would get out onto the street, like all the other people who were being evacuated, lose myself in the crowd. Once I was out of the street I’d just wait for someone to pick me up.”
“Someone?”
“The people who have my dad, and Rozzie—and Betsy. Once they had me, they might turn Betsy free and your hotel would be safe, sir.”
“And your parents?”
“We Willises would have to face whatever they have in store for us,” the boy said.
“You realize that these people who might pick you up want to use you to make your father talk?”
“That would be Dad’s decision.”
“And if he decided to talk, what do you think would happen to you then?”
“I know you think they wouldn’t let us go because we’d know who they are,” the boy said.
“Don’t you think your father is bright enough to know that, too?”
“It would be his decision, sir. Not yours or Betsy’s. You’d be safe and Dad would have solved the Willises’ problems.”
“Betsy will never be safe once they think she won’t be any use to them,” Chambrun said. “Your parents won’t be safe once they’ve played their last card—you. Our one hope of keeping them and Betsy alive is to let them know that we’re still holding you here, haven’t made up our minds yet what to do about you.”
“Captain Zachary said if you’d let me go he’d arrange to have me watched and followed, and rescue Dad and Rozzie and Betsy when they took me to them.”
“But if you went out on your own, Captain Zachary wouldn’t have been ready to cover you,” Chambrun said.
“I was going to try to find him,” the boy said.
“You decided his advice was better than mine?”
The boy pounded his fists on the arms of his chair. “I care for you and Betsy, sir! I couldn’t let you pay for the trouble Dad’s got himself into.”
“Let me put it to you this way,” Chambrun said, his voice very quiet. “I love Betsy Ruysdale better than anyone else in the world, boy. I admire your father and I owe him. But Betsy comes first. These people may still think they can persuade me, through her, to turn you over to them. For as long as they think that, Betsy has a chance. I appreciate what you tried to do for her and for me. But I can’t let it be played any other way than my way. I’d have to live with myself afterwards, knowing that I’d cost Betsy her life by not following my own judgment. You understand that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. With that understood, let’s see where we’re at.”
“It looks like we were at the foot of the hill with no path going up, sir,” young Guy said.
“Smart kid,” I heard myself say.
“How do you think your father would handle a situation like this?” Chambrun asked.
“Different than you, sir,” Guy said. “You have people you can trust—Mark here, and Mr. Dodd, and Lieutenant Hardy, and goodness knows how many more. You can count on them. It’s different in Dad’s work.”
“He doesn’t have people he can count on?”
“Oh, I suppose the President, and Colonel Martin, and other big shots in the government. But what Dad calls ‘the working stiffs’ are different.”
“In what way?”
“The temptations are too great,” the boy said. “The people who want to buy something can offer so much a lot of people couldn’t refuse.”
“They could make the same kind of offers to people in my world,” Chambrun said. He glanced at the old lady and me. “Do you think Mrs. Haven or Mark could refuse that kind of big offer?”
“Of course they could,” Guy said.
“How do you know?”
“I just know,” the boy said.
Chambrun reached out
and touched his shoulder again. “That’s how it is with me, Guy. I just know—know who I can trust. People who work for me feel they owe me loyalty, and that’s great. But people in your father’s world are working for their country, their nation, their government. Wouldn’t you think you could count on them more than I can count on my people?”
“My dad says that working for a government is different than any other job in the world,” Guy said. “A majority of the people elect a President, and they tell you it’s patriotic to support his programs. But a lot of people didn’t vote for him, and they’ll tell you it’s just as patriotic to oppose him. Salt that with a bribe big enough to buy a yacht, my dad says, and it can become even more patriotic to oppose the man in power.”
“Your dad is a very wise if somewhat cynical man,” Chambrun said.
“My dad is the greatest,” the boy said. “I’m not quite sure what ‘cynical’ is, but if it’s good, he’s got it all.”
“So now we have to concentrate on how to help him,” Chambrun said. “Can you suggest anyone your father has trusted whom he shouldn’t have trusted?”
“Gee, no, Mr. Chambrun. But I have to tell you again, my dad doesn’t talk much in front of me about his job. Maybe he talks to Rozzie when they’re alone, but not to me. What I don’t know I can’t tell. So I shouldn’t be tempted.”
“He thought you might sell him out?”
“No! He just thought I might be tempted to show what a big shot I am by knowing something important. But Dad would make jokes about some big-shot people—the way they talk, or their table manners, or their lack of a sense of humor. You have to deal with them, and you have to find different ways to communicate with different people. He’ll imitate the way they walk, or eat, or smoke. My dad could have been a real good actor.”
“But you never heard him say he had his doubts about this one or that one.”
“I’ve heard him say he was glad to be working for a man like Colonel Martin. I suppose that meant they didn’t disagree on how to handle situations.”
“Colonel Martin is on his way here from Washington,” Chambrun told the boy. “He may have information about your father’s job that Captain Zachary doesn’t have. He may be willing to name names to help us. We’ve got to play it cool until he gets here, Guy. We’ve got to play it my way. Can I count on you not to take off on us again?”
The boy nodded, almost sheepishly. “Yes, sir. You can count on me.”
“I’m going back down to my office, where any information the police, the bomb squad, come up with will come to me. Call me there if you need me for anything, either of you. If you think of anything, Guy, that hasn’t come to you yet—”
“Yes, sir.”
There was a sudden caterwaul out on the roof from the little dog Toto. Mrs. Haven went ahead of us to the door, calling to him. Coming toward us from Penthouse Three was Lieutenant Hardy.
“Toto!” Mrs. Haven shouted.
The little spaniel slunk toward us, muttering to himself.
“Thought I’d have another go at friend Gary,” Hardy said.
“I can tell you didn’t have any luck,” Chambrun said.
“Bastard is just laughing at us and threatening lawsuits,” Hardy said.
ANYTHING DEFINITE from the bomb squad was going to take a long time. They weren’t just searching some key place, but hundreds and hundreds of rooms, private and public. The first places to be given a clean bill of health were the basement areas—the garage, the machinery like furnaces and air-conditioning units, the elevators. One place they knew for certain the criminals had operated was below street level, leaving Tim Sullivan’s body and Major Willis’s uniform stashed in the trash bin. Word was that we weren’t going to be blown up from down below.
I had never seen Chambrun in the kind of state he was in as the morning wore on toward noon. The switchboard was being flooded with calls from, it seemed, all over the world. Everyone wanted to talk to Chambrun, and Mrs. Veach and her staff on the board were ordered to put no calls through except ones from Jerry Dodd, Hardy, Captain Zachary, and, believe it or not, Betsy Ruysdale or one of the Willises.
“You expect to hear from them?” I asked, not believing.
“They might put one of them on to me,” Chambrun said, “to let me know they are still alive, and to threaten me that it won’t stay that way long unless I do what they tell me to do.”
“And you won’t?”
“You don’t throw in the only trump card you hold,” Chambrun said. His anger was under such tight control it was almost painful to watch him hang on. “It’s like the Black Days.”
I had heard him talk about the Black Days before, a time more than forty years ago when, as a teenager, he’d fought in the French Resistance against the occupying Nazis in Paris.
“No way to make any kind of compromise or deal,” he said. “Death at the end of every street and alley. Kill or be killed. But there are a million faces out there and no way to guess which one to aim at. Because I will kill, Mark, if it comes to that.”
He walked over to his desk, took a small police special out of the drawer there. I’d seen that gun often, but I’d never seen it out of the drawer before. Now it was in the pocket of his gray tweed jacket.
Talk seemed essential to The Man as he walked restlessly around the office. “I never wanted any jokes or snide remarks about Betsy and me,” he said. “I tried to keep our relationship as private as I possibly could.”
“But it wasn’t exactly a secret, Boss,” I said. “There haven’t been any jokes, and I doubt very much that there will be now.”
“I’ve thought for years it would be bad luck for any woman to be linked to me,” he said.
“For goodness’ sake, why? There are hundreds of women who’d be delighted to be ‘linked’ with you.”
“Like that boy upstairs, I live with a nightmare,” Chambrun said. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket, and the hand that held his lighter wasn’t steady. “Forty years ago I was a teenaged kid, already a member of the French Resistance, living in Paris, my native city. The Nazis were approaching Paris, and we were prepared to fight them in the streets, block by block. We weren’t the army, but we fought and some of us died in a soldier’s discipline. We killed the enemy, just as any other soldier kills the enemy. It was our patriotic duty, no qualms about it.” He inhaled a deep breath of tobacco smoke and let it out slowly. “But I killed one Nazi colonel in a blind fury that had nothing to do with patriotism.”
I waited for him to go on. He would tell me or he wouldn’t.
“I was eighteen, but I thought of myself as a man, and I think I really was a man. The horrors of war and approaching defeat had skipped me past a whole period of growing up. I was a man—and facing death before I had to shave every day! And there was a woman.” His voice was suddenly unsteady. “That woman was a sixteen-year-old girl. Her name was Michelle Furneau. I was passionately in love with Michelle, and we were adults in wartime. We lived together as lovers, but it was more like man and wife—total commitment. It was forever. And then the Nazis came!” He raised both clenched fists above his head. “Damn them, damn them, damn them! Michelle and I had to separate. I was a member of the resistance and I had to go under cover. Michelle had a job as a secretary in one of the big hotels—the Splendide. The Nazis took over that hotel, and everyone who worked there was suddenly their slave. A Nazi colonel named Kreutz saw Michelle and decided she was to be his private property. What happened to her was reported to me by another French girl working at the Splendide. My Michelle was abused, raped, and finally shot dead when she tried to claw out Colonel Kreutz’s eyes with her sharp fingernails. Nothing mattered to me after that but revenge—not the war, not France, not the Resistance. All I wanted was revenge. I planned it carefully. I watched Kreutz’s routines—when he left the Splendide, where he lived, to go to the Nazi headquarters on Avenue Kleber; when he came back from work. I was waiting for him one twilight when he came back to the hotel from work.”
I waited for The Man to go on. Old emotions were shaking him.
“I shot him, right between his filthy eyes,” Chambrun said finally. “And when he fell I jumped up and down on his smirking face. He had been giving me, a French swine, a contemptuous smile, when I faced him and shot him. I was lucky. I escaped the bullets that were fired at me by Nazi guards outside the hotel. I had evened the score, but it was a hollow victory. There was no more Michelle.”
What do you say to that kind of revelation? A forty-year-old wound was wide open again.
“Like that boy upstairs, nightmares took over my sleeping hours,” Chambrun said. “It was a dream of my facing Kreutz, killing him, stomping him. It was a dream of Michelle being manhandled by that monster.” He shook his head as if to rid himself of an image that was as fresh to him as when it had happened long ago. “The war ended, the victory was ours, the Nazis were gone. But there was no Michelle, would never be anyone to take her place. Good things happened to me. I was working in the Splendide, which I thought of as Michelle’s tomb. An American, Mr. George Battle, came to stay with us. He was a multimillionaire who owned a great hotel here in New York—the Beaumont. He heard of things I had done as a member of the Resistance that had helped American troops at the end of the war. He took a shine to me. He offered to bring me to America, send me to Cornell University where there was a school in hotel management, and gave me a job at his hotel. I accepted. Anything to get away from the scene of my nightmares. There wasn’t even a grave of Michelle’s to care for. Her body had been dumped, like garbage, in a barge and buried at sea along with hundreds of other Nazi victims. The rest is history. I got to be manager of this hotel, and for a long time, every night, I dreamed of Michelle and Colonel Kreutz.”
“A horror story and a success story,” I said.
Nightmare Time Page 10
