Bargain with Death

by Hugh Pentecost

  “And so?”

  “And so you go up and observe as you’ve never observed in your life. And, Mark, if you have any chance to reassure those little girls, do what you can, even if you don’t believe in it. What a God-awful thing to do to two children!”

  “The whole thing is right out of a corny melodrama,” I said.

  “I have the unpleasant feeling we’re going to have to develop an appetite for corn,” Chambrun said. “It’s time for you to move, friend.”

  The Beaumont, as you may have guessed, is built in the shape of a large L, one arm pointing north, the other west. There are two banks of elevators, one for each wing, but if you are located in the west wing and you take the north elevators, all you have to do is walk around the L to your room.

  When I left Chambrun’s office, I realized I had wanted to ask him a dozen questions, all of which would have delayed my going—which was exactly what I wanted. Should I go directly to Fifteen, or should I go to Fourteen and walk up or Sixteen and walk down? If I suddenly appeared on Fifteen North, would some crazy bastard start taking shots at me? I made what I told myself was a bold decision. I would get my instructions from Colonel Coriander himself.

  I walked down the flight of stairs to the lobby and found myself on the fringes of a madhouse. Dozens of people were crowded around the front desk, some of them, as Coriander had reported, in their nightclothes. Voices were high and shrill and you could smell fear.

  I went over to the row of house phones near the north bank of elevators and called 15 A. The phone rang only once and then I heard Coriander’s sardonic voice.

  “This is Mark Haskell,” I told him.

  “I was beginning to wonder about you,” Coriander said.

  “How do I come up?” I asked.

  “By elevator, unless you’re on a weight reducing program and want to walk,” he said.

  “Is there a sentry or someone I have to get past?”

  “Just walk to the door of Fifteen A and knock,” Coriander said.

  I decided to take the west elevators and I walked over to that bank. There were operators on each car and one of Jerry’s men was standing guard. I told him that despite instructions I wanted out at Fifteen. He asked me if I didn’t think that was risky.

  “I’ve been invited by the head man,” I said.

  “You armed?” the man asked me.

  “No.”

  “Want to borrow my special?”

  “No chance,” I said. “I’ll probably be searched the first thing.”

  The elevator operator took me to Fifteen West. I got out, and the elevator went down, and I was alone. There wasn’t a soul in sight, not a maid, not the housekeeper, not anyone. I walked slowly around the L to the north wing. No one, no guard or sentry, no sign of anyone. The entire wing was still, silent, almost as if it was deserted. I walked slowly down the corridor to the door of 15 A. I hesitated a moment. My mouth felt full of ashes.

  I lifted my hand and knocked on the door. Almost before I could lower my hand, the door opened inward and I was confronted by something so unreal I had to clamp my teeth together to keep from crying out.

  A man faced me, a man as tall as I am, which is just over six feet. He was unbelievable. His face was hidden by a child’s Halloween mask, the kind of cardboard job you can buy in any novelty shop. It was a pirate’s face, with a black patch over one eye and a fierce, handlebar mustache on the upper lip. On top of that was a black fright wig, coarse hair straggling down to his shoulders. Observe, Chambrun had said; describe him so that a police artist can make a drawing of him. Jesus! I did observe one thing. He was wearing a red satin dressing gown, and the left sleeve was empty. One thing you can’t disguise is a missing arm.

  “Come in, Mr. Haskell.” The voice was unmistakable. Colonel Coriander was hidden behind all that childish jazz.

  I walked into the living room of the suite. It was a familiar room, the furnishings Victorian. No two suites in the Beaumont were furnished alike. The paintings on the wall, one a Turner I knew, were genuine, not reproductions. Only a few days ago I’d had a chat with Terrence Cleaves in this room. There was actually one of Cleaves’s pipes resting in an ash tray on the stretcher table behind the couch. The Ambassador was a chain pipe smoker.

  “You will have to forgive my infantile makeup, Mr. Haskell, but I’m sure Chambrun instructed you to be able to describe me accurately for a police artist. I’m not ready for that yet. Shall we get right down to business?”

  “What business?” I asked.

  “First you are to be convinced.”

  After fifteen minutes I was convinced that Colonel Coriander and his people had enough machine pistols, machine guns, rifles and handguns to do just about what he had said—hold off the United States Marine Corps. I saw only two other men during what Coriander called my “guided tour.” Both of them wore stocking masks over their heads. He had said thirty people, but I only saw those two. One of them was in the room which was occupied by one of Cleaves’s staff next to the suite. He sat by some kind of electrified box on a table.

  “One wrong move,” Coriander told me, “and my friend here touches a button and—boom! Elevators, fire stairs, maybe the whole building above us comes tumbling down. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—Would you like to see where the explosives are planted?”

  I was shown whether I wanted to see or not. Sticks of dynamite, or some other substance, wrapped together, wired to each other. They were located in every room I was shown, along the hall, in the service area, the linen closets, outside the elevator shaft and, I was assured, inside the shaft, too. There were crates and crates of ammunition for the guns. How this had all gotten in here, I couldn’t guess.

  When we finally got back to the sitting room in 15 A, my undershirt and shirt were wet with sweat, sticking to me.

  “Satisfied?” Coriander asked.

  “Satisfied,” I said.

  “I wanted to be sure that Chambrun didn’t assume I was overstating my case.”

  “I’ll make certain he knows that,” I said.

  “What has he done so far?”

  “He’s trying to contact the Cleaves family and staff, to begin with.”

  “He should have asked me. I could have told him where they were,” Coriander said. “The Ambassador is at the United Nations, along with the three male members of his staff and his two female secretaries. Mrs. Cleaves has gone shopping—Saks Fifth Avenue, she said. I suspect she’ll be coming back pretty soon.”

  “You plan to hold her, too?”

  “Dear me, no,” Coriander said. “You see, we chose just the right moment to take over, Haskell. There was no one in this suite or the rooms occupied by the Ambassador’s staff except the two little girls and the governess. We just moved in with them. No need for violence.”

  “They can be frightened to death without violence,” I said.

  “Very brave little girls,” Coriander said. “I do hope it won’t be necessary to harm them. That, of course, is up to all the people I suspect Mr. Chambrun is already contacting—the police, the FBI, the State Department, the Pentagon. I wouldn’t put it past your extraordinary boss to be talking to the President of the United States at this very moment.”

  “If he thought it was necessary,” I said.

  “He better begin to think so,” Coriander said.

  You might think there would have been an impulse to laugh at this man in his kid’s disguise. There wasn’t. Behind that mocking, amused voice was a toughness that left nothing at all to laugh at.

  “I know that Terrence Cleaves is very well off financially,” Coriander said. “But I don’t expect him to be able to raise fifty million dollars from his own sources.”

  “Who do you expect will pay you?” I asked.

  All traces of humor disappeared from his voice, and it rose slightly with a kind of intense anger. “The United States of America,” he said. “The men who bombed and massacred innocent civilians, the men who support a gov
ernment that imprisons thousands of dissenters in tiger cages, the men who defoliated and destroyed a nation’s crops so that little children starved to death, their bellies swollen, the men who gave the orders that resulted in the mutilation of thousands of men like me!” He was suddenly clutching his empty sleeve with his right hand, and his knuckles were white.

  “Are there instructions for delivering the money?” I asked.

  He seemed to let his breath out in a long sigh, and the crazy pirate’s mustache quivered. “There will be time enough for instructions,” he said. “The money is to be used to help rehabilitate the men and women in those tiger cages in Indochina. Until they are released, there is no use for the money. In case Chambrun does get to talk to the President, he might warn him that if there is too much delay I might send him a little girl’s ear on toast for his lunch break in the Oval Office.”

  I had the feeling he wasn’t kidding.

  “How do we know the Cleaves children are still in one piece?” I asked him.

  “The last part of your tour,” he said. “Come with me.”

  The suite consists of the living room we were in, and down a short corridor were two bedrooms and two baths. Coriander took me to one of the bedrooms and there were the two little girls and their governess. I had seen the children in the lobby of the hotel, beautifully turned out, almost ethereal in their looks. One of them was golden blonde and the other reddish. They wore their hair well down below their shoulders. Nice bones, wide friendly mouths, and eyes which, when they looked at me, were dark with fear.

  Coriander, despite his comic mask, adopted a manner of almost formal courtesy. “Mr. Haskell, may I introduce you to Miss Elizabeth Cleaves and Miss Mariella Cleaves.”

  The little girls’ mouths moved, but I didn’t hear any sound. Then the undertones of laughter came back into Coriander’s voice. “And this gorgeous dark lady of the sonnets is Miss Katherine Horn, who bears the unglamorous official title of governess.”

  Katherine Horn was something to look at, dark hair and eyes and a luscious mouth and figure. She stood, very erect, between the girls, an arm around each of them. She was staring intently at me.

  “Mr. Haskell is a messenger boy from the powers-that-be,” Coriander said. “If you want to send some kind of word to your parents, girls, I’m sure he’ll be glad to carry it for you. And you, Miss Horn, if there is some pining boy friend who craves your flesh, word might be gotten to him, too.”

  “Can you help us?” Katherine Horn asked me in a low, husky voice.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  Without looking at Coriander, she said: “This man is quite mad, you know. No one on earth will meet his demands.”

  “Things are in motion to see what can be done,” I said.

  “God help us,” Katherine Horn said.

  “Is there something I can tell your mother and father, girls?” I asked.

  “That we love them,” Elizabeth said, in a small voice.

  “That we’re all right, not hurt,” Mariella said, in a stronger voice. She was the redhead.

  “That we’ll try to be brave,” Elizabeth said.

  “That we’re not afraid,” Mariella said.

  “That it would be nice to see them.”

  “That we’re sure they’re doing whatever is necessary to have us released.”

  “I’ll pass all that along to them,” I said.

  “Thank you, sir,” they said, together.

  Coriander took me back to the living room. I felt even more shaken than I had been before I saw the girls and Miss Horn.

  “Miss Horn creates something of a problem,” Coriander said, laughter behind the words again. “There are more than twenty of us up here who have not taken the monastic vows of celibacy. It would be so much easier if she would opt for pleasure instead of heroism.” He shook his head as though it was beyond him. “So, you have seen our fortress, Mr. Haskell, and you have seen the little lovelies who are our leverage. I think you can assure Mr. Chambrun that we can hold off any kind of attack, and that if we are driven to it, we can blow his hotel to hell and gone.”

  “I’ll tell him what I’ve seen,” I said. I wanted to get out of there. I had come up to 15 A a little scared, but certain that we were being confronted by some kind of massive bluff. I was convinced now that Coriander wasn’t bluffing, and that he was, as Katherine Horn had said, quite mad, quite capable of carrying out any threats he made.

  “There are one or two small points I would like you to pass on to Chambrun,” Coriander said. “I have explained to him that we must have room service at all times. Just in case anyone got the wild idea that we could be poisoned by what we eat or drink, let them know that the little girls will taste everything first. It will be necessary for some of us to come and go from time to time. We are not to be interfered with. If any one of my people is stopped, questioned, held, you will instantly receive evidence that one of the girls has paid a price for it. Clear?”

  “Quite clear,” I said.

  He laughed. “I wonder how you will describe me to Chambrun.”

  I tried not to look at his empty sleeve. “You’ve made that impossible,” I said.

  “Perhaps we’ll meet again,” he said. “I shall insist on your being my contact with Chambrun. Good-bye, Haskell. Be persuasive.”

  And then I was out in the hall and literally running toward the west wing.

  I suppose different people react in different ways to moments of high tension. I find myself suddenly aware of absurd details, enlarged and magnified. Standing outside the elevator door on 15 West I noticed that a tiny piece of the brass number on the door had been chipped away; down the hall the door to the linen room stood open, a violation of the rules. Then I remembered that everyone had been ordered off the floor by Coriander, probably in panic. Then I remembered the elevator wasn’t going to stop at 15 no matter how long I rang the bell. Chambrun’s orders.

  I ran for the fire stairs, breathing as hard as if I’d covered an Olympic mile. I’d only gone a few steps down when I was confronted by two of Jerry Dodd’s men. They had instructions to check on anyone who came to or left the fifteenth floor, but to let them go. Of course they knew me. How bad was it up there? What about the little girls? I told them the danger was very real and that, so far, the girls and Miss Horn were still in one piece. I thought of Coriander threatening to send the President of the United States something for his lunch break in the Oval Office. Tomato surprise! You lift the cover and there is a little girl’s ear. Jesus!

  An elevator stopped for me at 14. I was instantly conscious of a wart on the back of the operator’s neck. I wondered if the poor sonofabitch knew he might be dying of cancer.

  I was let out at the second floor and into bedlam. The corridor, all the way from the elevator to Chambrun’s office, was jammed with people, all talking and some shouting at once. Most of them were hotel guests. There was a sprinkling of reporters I recognized, and they set up a roadblock for me. Was it true I’d been up to 15? Was there any real danger? Evidently nothing had leaked yet about Coriander or his hostages, because nobody asked me about them. It wouldn’t be long before the whole story broke, and then God help us all.

  I edged my way through protesting people to the door of Chambrun’s office. Two more of Jerry’s men were holding back the crowd. They let me through into Miss Ruysdale’s outer sanctum. Miss Ruysdale’s telephones were being manned by a girl from the business office, which meant that Miss Ruysdale was inside with the boss. I went through into Chambrun’s office, where I found him surrounded by people, most of them strangers to me except, of course, Miss Ruysdale, and the handsome, copper-haired woman I knew to be Constance Cleaves, the mother of the two little girls I’d just left upstairs.

  Animated conversation ended abruptly and everyone in the room was focused on me. I looked at Chambrun for instructions, but his blank stare told me nothing. Constance Cleaves came at me, almost running across the thick rug.

  I had seen this
woman around the hotel but we’d never had any conversation together. She was strikingly beautiful, with high cheekbones, wide mouth, and dark blue eyes set off by that coppery hair. She must have married Cleaves and had her children when she was very young, for I took her to be not much more than thirty. The Ambassador had to be in his early fifties. She had a gorgeous figure set off by clothes that had been designed for her by a genius. She had gone shopping that morning in a simple cotton print that I knew, from my contacts with fashion shows, had set the Cleaves exchequer back about four hundred bucks.

  Her low, husky voice shook me, because she was obviously fighting terror. “You saw the girls, Mr. Haskell?”

  I tried to sound reassuring. “I saw them. They’re fine, Mrs. Cleaves. They said to tell you that they’re fine, that they aren’t afraid.”

  “Thank God!” she said.

  “They said to tell you they know you’re doing everything you can to get them released.”

  She turned away from me and her voice rose in a sort of cry of despair. “What are we doing? What in God’s name are we doing?”

  No one answered her. She turned back to me.

  “I don’t think you need to worry for the time being, Mrs. Cleaves,” I said. “They don’t expect decisions to be made quickly. The girls are being kept in one of the bedrooms with Miss Horn, who appears to have kept her cool.”

  Rather astonishingly, Constance Cleaves laughed—a short, sharp little laugh. “Katherine can be depended on to be cool,” she said. No love lost there, I thought. I remember thinking that while her speech pattern was cultivated, it didn’t sound British. I wondered if Terrence Cleaves had married an American.

  “I think you can count on the girls’ being safe for the time being, Mrs. Cleaves,” Chambrun said in a hard, flat voice. “If you will forgive us, there are a great many questions we need to ask Mark.”

  Several of the strange men in the room started to ask questions at the same time, but Chambrun cut them off.