Bargain with Death

by Hugh Pentecost

  “You have only to wander around in the corridors of that United Nations to hear all that I’ve heard, know all that I know,” Clarke said. He lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the one he was smoking. “The Middle East is oil,” he said. “For a hundred years or more the oil fields out there have been leased and operated by Western powers—first Great Britain and then the United States. The rulers of those strange Arab countries have grown fat and rich on Western money—the British pound and the American dollar.”

  “Do I need a lesson in economics?” Chambrun asked. I was surprised at his impatience, the angry glitter in his hidden eyes.

  Clarke gave him a paternal smile. “Of course not. It is a sketchy background, perhaps necessary for you to understand the present turmoil,” he said. “Demands for oil are increasing beyond belief—oil for tanks, and gun carriers and planes, and armored vehicles. Oil for war and preparedness against war. Then there are millions of automobiles, increasing by the hundreds of thousands almost annually. Oil has replaced coal in industry. Every man living in a non-tropical climate heats his home with oil, uses oil to mow his lawns, for God sake. There was a time when the United States’ own oil production was enough for its needs. No more. But no cause for worry, you understand. The United States had control of vast amounts of oil around the world. That control depended on two things, Mr. Chambrun. Those two things were contracts written on pieces of paper and the force of arms to keep those contracts valid. So things have changed.”

  “Exactly how?” Chambrun asked.

  “The rulers of these countries are still fat and rich, but they now see ways of getting even fatter and richer—and also much more powerful. They have been fed with the virus of revolution. They have been led to believe they can seize control of their oil supplies and to hell with the contracts. They can triple their wealth by tripling the price they will sell for. And who will buy at these inflated prices? The West desperately needs the oil, but now the Communist world needs it equally badly. The threat of military power to enforce old contracts is not so much of a threat as it once was. The big powers are reluctant to use force, for fear some madman might press a button that would destroy the whole world. So it becomes a matter of wheeling and dealing. The little kings and the little tyrants hold the whip hand. If they sell to us, the Communists will moan, and groan, and threaten but they will not actually move in force against us. If they sell to the Communists, we will moan and groan but we will not strike. So it comes down to what you might call grassroots free enterprise. The highest bidder will get it. And with what does he bid? Money? Some, of course, but also guns and planes so that the little kings and tyrants can protect themselves from each other and also from Israel, which poses a constant threat. It is a seller’s market, Mr. Chambrun.”

  “J. W. Sassoon was a buyer, right?” Chambrun asked.

  “Oh, yes, very much so. He was a man with more money than you can dream of. One of the sources of his wealth was a vast production of war material. He was a man who could bid against governments.”

  “And he needed your advice,” Chambrun said.

  “My field is politics,” Clarke said. “It’s called diplomacy in the upper echelons. Which brings me to your Mr. Gamayel.”

  “At last,” Chambrun said.

  Clarke put down his empty glass. “Mr. Gamayel is a part of a new world, Mr. Chambrun. He has told you, I gather, that he represents his government; that he was discussing a deal with Sassoon for his government. The missing documents?” Clarke laughed. “Like most of the business and political world today, Mr. Gamayel is playing two sides of the street. He represents his government at the United Nations, but in this projected deal with J. W. Sassoon he represents other interests. Mr. Gamayel wants to be an important man on a winning team. There is a group in his country ready to seize power from the present government. This countergroup is trying to deal, before the fact, with potential buyers of the country’s oil. If they can show that they are in business before they strike, a lot of people will turn coats for them. They preferred to deal with a private buyer, like Sassoon, than with governments—like Washington or Moscow. Too many people get a piece of the pie when you deal with governments.”

  “Sassoon asked for your advice,” Chambrun said.

  “He asked for my opinion. Could Gamayel’s countergroup actually make it? Could they seize the power?”

  “And you told him?”

  “That if they could make a deal with him in advance—or a deal with someone of equal power—they could make it. So you can see why Mr. Gamayel is so concerned about his missing documents and why he has a right to be afraid.”

  “Not quite,” Chambrun said.

  “Because those documents will reveal not just a financial arrangement with J. W. Sassoon, but an upcoming coup. Probably names, dates, and the like. In the hands of the present government this information might make it possible for them to abort the coup before it can take place. Mr. Gamayel stands to be killed by one side for having been a traitor, and by the other for having been criminally careless and exposing their plans before they can set them in motion. Whichever side gets to him first is very likely to polish off Mr. Gamayel.”

  “And for which side might a man like Treadway be working?”

  Clarke shrugged. “Either side. He works for money. It can’t make very much difference to Gamayel, however, since both sides will be out to get him.”

  “His danger is real, then?”

  “I would say very real.”

  Chambrun picked up one of his phones and asked the switchboard to locate Jerry Dodd and have him report. “He’ll need more than a locked door to protect him,” Chambrun said. He looked at Valerie, who had sat, motionless, through Clarke’s exposition. “I regret going into a painful past with you, Mrs. Brent, but I’m afraid I must. Five years ago you and your husband stayed with us here in the Beaumont. Do you remember what he was working on then—nineteen sixty-eight?”

  “Michael came over here to write some articles on the Presidential campaigns for a British magazine,” she said.

  “Nothing connected with the Middle East?”

  She hesitated. “Michael had been very concerned with the Arab-Israeli confrontation. He did a book on the six-day war, you know.”

  “So Treadway might have had an interest in him then?”

  “I can’t think what,” Valerie said. “If he was working for one of the countries out there, I suppose—”

  “The next time you came here was two years ago,” Chambrun said, his face expressionless. “Your husband was working on a biography of J. W. Sassoon.”

  “Not so much a biography of Sassoon as of Sassoon’s empire,” Valerie said.

  “Sassoon had been involved in Middle East oil for twenty-five years. That must have been part of your husband’s story.”

  Valerie looked down at her hands, which were locked together in her lap. “Very much a part of it. Michael told me, many times, that J. W. Sassoon was one of the original robber barons. ‘I’m going to write things in this book he isn’t going to like,’ Michael told me.”

  “Lieutenant Hardy tells me you thought they quarreled over this material.”

  “They did. Mr. Sassoon was in a rage about it, but Michael intended to go right ahead—was going ahead—”

  “That’s why you thought Sassoon might be responsible for your husband’s death? Killed him and burned his manuscript?”

  “Yes,” Valerie said. It was a whisper.

  “And yet the mysterious Mr. Treadway is on the scene once more. Is it possible there were things in the manuscript that other interests might have objected to?”

  “I suppose so,” Valerie said. “Michael wrote the truth as he found it.”

  Chambrun looked at Clarke. “Does it seem likely to you that Treadway could have been working for J.W.? He had his own man for rough stuff—James Olin.”

  “Treadway could have been working for anyone,” Clarke said. “A job at a time. He has never had any allegianc
es, any flag, any loyalties.”

  “One more question about this whole intrigue, Mr. Clarke. Involved are the present government of Mr. Gamayel’s country and the countergroup planning a coup. There could be a third group involved, couldn’t there? A group that could use Mr. Gamayel’s documents to blackmail the countergroup, or buy favors from the present government?”

  Clarke nodded, his smile faded. “Whoever has those documents has the power to change history,” he said. “You see, if a third person or group—”

  He never finished, because Chambrun’s office was shaken by something that sounded like an enormous explosion. Chambrun was on his feet in a second, headed for the door. There have been endless bomb scares over the last few years.

  Miss Ruysdale, looking as nearly rattled as I’ve ever seen her, met Chambrun at the door.

  “It seems to be on this floor,” she said.

  We went through her office and out into the hall. The air was thick with what looked like plaster dust to me. It was thickest down the hall near my office, my apartment. We were just approaching the center of it, choking on the dust, when Jerry Dodd, our security officer, came racing up the stairs from the lobby.

  “Thank God you’re all right, boss,” he said to Chambrun. “When I heard it, I thought it was in your office.”

  We’d reached the door to my apartment by then—only there wasn’t any door. It had been blown off its hinges. Jerry tried to stop Chambrun, but Chambrun was ahead of all of us into my rooms. It was almost impossible to breathe. The dust was thick and there was the acrid smell of some kind of gunpowder or explosive. The two locks and the chain on my door had not protected Mr. Gamayel.

  But Mr. Gamayel was nowhere in the apartment. Some china had been smashed by the explosion, a painting knocked off the far wall, a chair overturned. Chambrun quickly checked the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom. No Gamayel.

  There were little tongues of flame around the door frame and I found myself pushed aside by Jerry Dodd, who had dug up a fire extinguisher. It was still like looking at a pea soup London fog, everyone coughing and choking. Someone took me by the arm and turned me around. I found myself looking down into Valerie Brent’s wide, hazel eyes.

  “Please help me, Mark,” she whispered. “For God sake, help me!”

  For a stupid moment I thought she was hurt. I reached out for her and I could feel her body trembling.

  “Come to my room when you can,” she said.

  Then Clarke loomed up out of the fog and put a protective arm around her shoulders. “It looks as if we were a little late to help Gamayel,” he said. He looked down at Valerie. “Let me get you out of here, Val. We’re just in the way.”

  He took her off, headed for the staircase leading down to the lobby. She didn’t look back at me.

  Part Three

  1

  CHAMBRUN WAS QUICKER TO put the scene into perspective than anyone else. I heard him giving orders to Jerry Dodd.

  “You’ll put B Plan into operation at once, Jerry.”

  “Right.”

  “And nobody is to leave this hotel, not even through a rat hole, without an okay. Don’t take any ‘diplomatic immunity’ crap from anybody.”

  When Chambrun uses that kind of language, his anger has reached the explosion point. A couple of Jerry’s men and a couple of cops came crowding through my charred doorway.

  “Get moving, man!” Chambrun said to Jerry. “There’s nothing to do here but make sure the fire’s out!” He took me by the arm and literally dragged me out into the hall. Miss Ruysdale was hovering there. “Get back to the office, Ruysdale!” he ordered her. “We’re putting B Plan into operation.”

  We were all three of us gasping for breath when we got back into his air-conditioned suite of offices. B Plan was a method for dealing with bomb threats. They’d been a dime a dozen a while back. Hotels, banks, even Grand Central Station had been a target for that kind of terror tactic. The problem was how to deal quickly with the situation when some crackpot called in to tell us there was a bomb planted somewhere in the Beaumont. The hotel was thirty stories high, plus the three penthouses on the roof, plus three basements and subbasements below the lobby floor, over nine hundred private and public rooms, including the shops in the lobby area. Figuring a minimum of ten minutes to search a room thoroughly, you were talking about a hundred and fifty man-hours of work—like six days! It became a simple matter of logistics. Turn fifteen people loose on each floor simultaneously and you could pretty well cover the whole place in half an hour. This meant using practically every employee on duty in the hotel at any given time—maids, housekeepers, cleaning crews, bellhops, doormen, waiters, bartenders, office personnel, and, of course, the security staff. Everyone had a specific assignment. If guests were not in their rooms, passkeys were used. If guests were reluctant to admit searchers—and it wasn’t unlikely that we might barge in on situations where the wrong people were in the wrong beds—we were instructed to be firm, as blind to indiscretion as possible. If that didn’t work, then Chambrun himself was called on to handle the situation.

  “You think there may be more bombings?” Miss Ruysdale asked Chambrun.

  “No. But I want the bomber. I want Olin and Treadway. I want Gamayel.”

  “If he’s still alive,” I said. The force of the explosion at my door must, I thought, have knocked Gamayel cold.

  “You think someone’s carrying him around the hotel dead or unconscious?” Chambrun asked. “He wasn’t in the room when that door was blown open.”

  “He was there!” I said. “I heard him lock himself in. Two locks and the chain.”

  “So he let himself out,” Chambrun said. “We were down the hall thirty or forty seconds after the explosion. No one had time to drag a body out of there and get away with it.”

  “He was too scared to leave the rooms,” I said.

  “More scared of something else, maybe,” Chambrun said. He turned to Ruysdale. “Find out if Gamayel made a call from Mark’s rooms, or if he received a call.”

  Chambrun went to his phones and called Karl Nevers at the front desk. No one was to leave the hotel without an okay. “I know it could start a riot,” Chambrun said. “I want Treadway, Olin, and Gamayel. I want any strangers that you don’t know or who can’t be vouched for by people we trust. Any of the regulars who want out can go, but I want a record of who’s allowed to leave.”

  Miss Ruysdale came back from her office. “They don’t keep any kind of record of Mark’s out-calls,” she said, “unless, of course, they’re long distance. But in-calls are a little different. The operator holds on until the phone is answered. That’s a routine on all in-calls through the switchboard. If there’s no answer, there may be a message. There was a call in about forty minutes ago. The operator remembers because it wasn’t Mark who answered. A man with a slight accent, she says. But when the connection was made, she cut out.”

  “Gamayel has an accent,” I said.

  “He does, and he went out after he got the call,” Chambrun said.

  “He was too scared to go out,” I insisted.

  “Not if someone told him where he could find his precious documents,” Chambrun said. “Two sides are after him. One of them tried to bomb him out, the other suckered him out with a phone call. He’d have been safer facing the bomb, I think.”

  It was then that I told Chambrun about Valerie Brent’s plea for help. I wasn’t going to play the Lone Ranger a second time. Phones were blinking on Chambrun’s desk.

  “Maybe you should find out what it is,” he said. He gave me an odd look. “If it turns out to be your sexual prowess that’s needed, be good enough to put it off until sometime when I don’t require your services.”

  It had only been a few minutes since the word had gone out, but already people were reporting to their posts in accordance with B Plan. Cops and technicians were swarming around and in my apartment, but down the hall I saw people were already in my office searching for a bomb Chambrun didn’t expec
t them to find. We were going to be covered from top to bottom before midnight. It was going to be an embarrassing night for the sexual adventurers.

  I got an elevator to the eighth floor. A crew consisting of maids, the housekeeper, members of the cleaning crew, room service waiters, and a couple of Jerry’s men were already knocking on doors up and down the corridor. I gathered some of the situations were pretty sticky, but the word “bomb” worked wonders with most of them.

  A maid was knocking at Valerie’s door.

  “No one home, I guess,” she said.

  “Then use your passkey,” I said.

  I felt a moment of panic as the maid fumbled with her key and finally got the door open. Valerie had asked me to come when I could. I had expected her to be there.

  The room was just as the maids are trained to leave things in the evening—a light burning on the bedside table, the bed turned down. The maid had been trained how to make her search, and I stood in the center of the room looking around vaguely. So help me, I didn’t want to go into the bathroom. I had been in Trudy Woodson’s. The maid went straight there, however, and there were no cries of horror from her. I was aware of Valerie’s presence, a faint, personalized perfume. The maid opened the closet door and I saw her clothes hanging there. She went for bright colors. I knew I wanted to find her very badly.

  It occurred to me that she and Clarke might have stopped in one of the main floor bars for a drink. It would be natural enough. They must have been pretty well shaken up by the bombing.

  I found Clarke, but he was alone. He was nursing a highball in the Spartan Bar, last bastion of chauvinist male pigs. No women allowed in the Spartan. Johnny-baby had meant to break that down with his topless cigarette girls. The Spartan is always quiet. Several old-timers were playing chess and backgammon in a far end of the room. I joined Clarke.