Birthday, Deathday

by Hugh Pentecost

  “The General isn’t going to like you listening in,” I said.

  “The General won’t know, if Mrs. Kiley does her job properly,” Chambrun said. “I want a transcript of all calls sent to me as they are made—except of course, room service orders. I’ll get the word from the kitchen on those.”

  “I don’t suppose monitoring will do much good,” Peter said, “if they speak in Chinese.”

  “My dear Mr. Williams, members of almost all the UN delegations live here. We have multilingual operators on our switchboards. Chinese is no problem, I promise you.” Chambrun turned back to Miss Ruysdale. “I want you to talk to the chief engineer. I want the entire bank of elevators to the twelfth floor under constant control. If I want the power off there, I want it done in a matter of seconds.”

  “Right.”

  “Get hold of the master electrician. I want the bug in the General’s suite activated.”

  “You’ve bugged the General’s room?” I asked “In the air-conditioning unit,” Chambrun said. “Long-playing tape.”

  “Suppose he finds it?”

  Chambrun gave me a fleeting smile. “We’ll blame it on Wexler,” he said. “Get going, Ruysdale.”

  Miss Ruysdale evaporated.

  I had been watching Laura Malone. She had moved away to the far wall and was studying the blue Picasso. She seemed not to have been listening to Chambrun’s exchange with Ruysdale. Chambrun went over to the Turkish coffee maker.

  “Anyone join me?” he asked.

  Laura Malone turned away from the painting. “I’d love to,” she said.

  Chambrun brought her a small demitasse cup and put it down on one of the end tables beside an armchair.

  “You drink it as it comes,” he said. “Sugar or cream spoils its flavor.” He stood beside her as she sat down, balancing his own cup and saucer in the palm of his left hand. He watched her as she tasted. She looked up at him and smiled. She had won him. Most people struggle to hide their dislike of that potent brew.

  “I don’t think we have the right to ask you and Mr. Williams to undertake this hunt for Drury,” he said, moving toward his desk.

  “Why not?” Peter asked, in a flat voice.

  “Wexler described it pretty accurately,” Chambrun said, sitting down in his high-backed chair. “Like gangsters taking over. Li Sung knew you were here. He may have reported before he died. Chang won’t bother to guess whether you told Sung the truth—that you were here to warn Drury off. He’ll lump you as the enemy. Drury is known to be a potential assassin. You are his friends. Cross Chang’s path and he won’t stop to weigh possibilities. He has the excuse of Li Sung’s murder—because that’s almost certainly what it was, murder. In this strange world of diplomacy he has a right to defend himself. He won’t wait to ask for help from Wexler, or Larch, or anyone else. So I think you are both in the gravest kind of danger. Chang may want to kill just to get even for Li Sung.”

  Laura lowered her demitasse cup. “But you still want to locate Neil?”

  Chambrun nodded. “Because he is Chang’s number one target.”

  “Then I don’t have any choice,” she said quietly. “I don’t know about Peter.”

  “Neither do I have a choice,” Peter said.

  “Then I’d like to suggest a game-plan for this situation,” Chambrun said. “When Chang arrives, you two stay out of his way. He’s going to be an angry man when he gets here, angry and secretly frightened. That’s when a killer is most dangerous. No point in showing yourselves and inviting an instant reaction from him. Understood?”

  “Yes,” Laura said.

  Peter’s black goggles were focused on the blue Picasso, which he couldn’t see.

  “I don’t believe Drury will try anything tonight,” Chambrun said. “He’ll probably wait until he’s had a chance to study the precautionary plans Wexler has set up. I’m convinced he won’t just take a pot shot at the General. He has to face him, to make sure Chang has a few moments to know the meaning of fear, to know why he is dying. If I’m wrong, it will take a miracle to stop him. If, I’m right, he’ll take time to choose the perfect moment, and that gives us a chance.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Peter asked. “Laura and I should start circulating.”

  “Listen to me,” Chambrun said. “I don’t believe in magic. I’m not a romantic. Maybe you’ll recognize his voice, Williams. Maybe you have some special personal radar system, Miss Malone, that’ll tell you Drury’s nearby. I, personally, count on something else.

  Laura was watching him intently.

  “I count on his caring enough for you—both of you, but particularly Miss Malone—to want to get you away from here.”

  “Why?”

  “Does it occur to you that Chang might try to use you as a hostage for his safety? Chang’s best bet, if he doesn’t choose to let Drury get to him, is to get hold of one or both of you and let Drury know what will happen to you if he doesn’t give himself up.”

  I felt the small hairs rising on the back of my neck. Drury knew, God help him, what Chang did to hostages. We were crazy to use these two people, I told myself. They could be a way for Chang to help himself.

  “Drury has made a study of Chang,” Chambrun said. “He’ll see that possibility at once. He’ll be desperate to get you to give up, go away. So, I don’t think you’ll have to recognize his voice or feel some romantic stirrings. Give him the chance to get to you without attracting attention to himself and he’ll take it.”

  Laura’s fingers were gripping her black patent-leather handbag so tightly they had turned a dead white.

  “So you don’t circulate together,” Chambrun said. “Mr. Williams, I suggest you go down to the grill room and have dinner. Take time with it. Mark will arrange with the captain there to give you a conspicuous table. If Drury spots you he may approach you or get some kind of message to you. You can’t move around as readily as Miss Malone. Stay put. Pray.”

  “Right,” Peter said.

  Chambrun’s narrowed eyes turned to Laura. “I suggest you go to the Blue Lagoon for a drink. We discourage lone women there, but Mark will arrange with Mr. Cardoza, the maître d’. Have a drink, move on to the Trapeze. We’ll have somebody watching you in case of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Laura asked.

  “A woman alone, circulating from bar to bar in this or any other hotel, attracts a special kind of attention,” Chambrun said. “From wolves. The chances are you’ll be invited to dinner, invited upstairs to a room. We’ll be watching you, but we won’t be able to move in too fast. It could always be Drury acting a part. We’ll need some sort of indication from you that you need help.”

  Her voice was low, bitter. “I had experience with that sort of thing in the old days,” she said.

  “So you’ll know how to handle it,” Chambrun said. “I have one last piece of advice.”

  “Yes?”

  “Run,” he said. “Get as far away from here as you can as fast as you can.”

  Peter stood up. “Will you arrange for a table for me in the grill, Mark?” he asked

  Chambrun let his breath out in a long sigh. “Good luck,” he said. “I think Mark shouldn’t go with you. It could scare Drury off. The same for you, Miss Malone.”

  “I understand.”

  “Stay here for a few minutes until Mr. Williams gets settled in the grill, then start your ploy. And good luck to you both.”

  CHAPTER 2

  WHEN I LOOK BACK on the extraordinary triple manhunt that started that evening at the Beaumont, I realize that there was a stretch of time, starting right then in Chambrun’s office, when I was less than a totally efficient soldier in Chambrun’s army. I call it a triple manhunt because that’s what it was. Wexler and Larch and Chambrun were hunting for Drury to prevent a murder and save his life. Chang and his strong-arm boys and his elaborate staff would be hunting for Drury to eliminate him as a danger to the General forever. And there was Lieutenant Hardy, an old friend of ours at th
e Beaumont, attached to the homicide squad of the New York police, who hadn’t at that moment appeared on the scene but who would be hunting for Drury, or Mr. X, as the possible murderer of Li Sung.

  In telling the story there is no point in delaying the revelation of certain facts that came later in that first, turbulent evening. On the roof of the Beaumont there are four penthouse apartments. They are serviced by the hotel staff but they are co-ops, owned by the tenants. One of them belongs to Mr. Battles, the Beaumont’s owner. He has never set foot in it so far as I know. Chambrun has lived in it for twenty years. The other three owners are inconsequential to this story, had nothing to do with it, though I suspect they suffered a good deal under questioning from the FBI, the CIA, Jerry Dodd, and later Lieutenant Hardy. None of them saw anything, heard anything. One was a wonderfully weird old lady, a Mrs. Haven, who lived alone in a Collier-brothers’ jumble of relics of a past life, with a small, obnoxious, black-and-white Japanese spaniel. The others were two elderly couples, each living in a kind of old world elegance, lonely, uncurious. They were all beyond suspicion in the murder of Li Sung. If any of them had seen or heard anything they would have said so. They were law abiding, quiet, uninterested in anything but what they ate, whether they were hot or cold, whether the sun was out or not.

  But they had all been within yards of a violence, because Li Sung, either before or after he was killed, had been thrown off the roof not ten yards from the heat-withered little garden that was part of Mrs. Haven’s domain. There was a scuffed-up area in which there was a sample of human blood, and conclusively, there was a little piece of cloth that had been torn from Li Sung’s jacket. The struggle had been brief. Mrs. Haven, known to us in the hotel as the Madwoman of Chaillot, stated flatly that nothing could have happened where it obviously had happened. She hadn’t been out of her apartment since early afternoon when she’d walked her dog. If anything had happened out on the roof, Toto, the spaniel, would have given her warning. Toto, she insisted, was a perfect watchdog. Most of us in the hotel knew that Toto was too fat and lazy to have barked at anyone for years.

  That’s where Li Sung had been attacked—ten yards from Mrs. Haven’s rear windows. He had been thrown over the parapet. When they scooped his remains up off the sidewalk, there was so little of him left in one piece that the medical examiner’s report was not too definitive. It did suggest that there was evidence that Sung had been stabbed with some kind of knife or sharp, pointed instrument, but the condition of his body made it impossible to be very exact about it. So much for what I didn’t know when I was left alone in Chambrun’s office with Laura Malone while Peter left for the grill and Chambrun headed for an inspection of the twelfth floor. I have said that I wasn’t a totally efficient soldier in Chambrun’s army at that moment. Laura Malone was the reason.

  I don’t know if I can explain it. Nothing quite like it had ever happened to me before. I am thirty-six years old, reasonably sophisticated. The world I lived and worked in, Chambrun’s world, had made me a little cynical about people. I’d seen hundreds of attractive exteriors that covered hidden cesspools. Beautiful women swarm the corridors and public rooms of the Beaumont. You learn to look at them with a completely impersonal eye. God knows what beds they were tossing around in, or what sexual aberrations they enjoyed—like whipping elderly machine-tool manufacturers. Nothing looks good enough to me really to want until I have listened to them talk, till I have sampled their humor, till I know something about their tastes and predilections.

  Laura Malone had walked into Chambrun’s office and I was gone. I knew what she had been. I knew about her association with Neil Drury, to whom the same sort of instant involvement had evidently happened; I knew that she still loved Drury and that, according to Peter, they were still two parts of one whole. There wasn’t the slightest reason to imagine that she would look at me twice. If she’d have any interest in anyone, it would be Peter, who had been her man’s closest friend.

  When I was a small boy my mother took me to some sort of children’s play. I don’t remember much about it except that it was a variation on the Cinderella theme. The heroine was a little girl, badly treated by a wicked mother and wicked sisters, starved, beaten. It was all very real to me. I pleaded with my mother to invite the girl home, give her a good dinner, comfort her. My mother couldn’t convince me that it wasn’t real, that the girl was an actress who didn’t need a meal or comfort. I remember I wept because I wasn’t allowed to protect her or help her.

  It was something like that all over again. I felt needed. I wanted to protect Laura Malone, with my life if necessary. I wanted to touch her, to soothe her, to erase the look of tragedy in her dark blue eyes. I was out of my cotton-picking mind, but that’s the way it was. Five minutes after I laid eyes on her I could have told you exactly how the gold-blonde hair curled down around her ears, just how the soft yielding mouth tightened at the corners when she was being decisive, just how a kind of desperate hunger was mirrored in her eyes when Drury was mentioned.

  I understood now why Drury hadn’t ever gone back to her after South America. I understood what he meant when he’d told Peter he couldn’t see her because he might find himself forgetting what had happened to his family. “I need you!” is a siren song most of us can’t resist.

  She and I were alone in Chambrun’s office. I’d called down to the grill and talked to Mr. Quiller, the captain there. He would have a table facing the entrance for Peter. I gave him a quick sketch of the situation. Then I called Cardoza in the Blue Lagoon. Laura was not to be discouraged from having a drink there by herself. If she was approached by anyone, Cardoza was to hold his fire until he got some sort of signal from the girl that she was in trouble.

  I came away from the phone and offered her a drink.

  “It looks as if it might be a drinking evening,” she said. “I think I’d better save up for it.” She suddenly lifted her hands to her face. “I—I sometimes think I don’t want to find Neil, don’t want to see him,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because he won’t be the Neil I know.”

  “His changed face?”

  “Not that.” She lowered her hands and her eyes were brimming with tears. “Five years of hating. Five years of scheming and plotting. Five years without love, without loving. I listened to Mr. Chambrun just now and I wondered if I was strong. Maybe I won’t know him because he’s no longer the man I knew. He can be so changed inside that nothing will come across to me.”

  “If Chambrun’s right that may not matter. He’ll come to you.”

  “And if I don’t know him?” She looked up at me, her eyes wide.

  “He’ll be pleased. It’ll mean his disguise is perfect—if you don’t know him.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “What is he like?” I asked. Chambrun had said we had to know everything there was to know about him.

  She was silent for a moment. “Somebody is bound to have told you about me,” she said. “That I was a professional sex peddler when I met Neil.”

  I felt my jaw muscles tighten. “Peter told me. How you met Drury, went to live with him, were on the verge of marrying him.”

  “We were married,” she said, “except for a legal document.” She turned the dark blue eyes on me, and my knees weakened. “You’re only the second man who knows about me who hasn’t looked at me as though I was a freak. Neil was the other. Maybe Peter, because he knows that Neil loved me, doesn’t think I’m all bad.”

  I said something meaningless because I didn’t know what to say.

  “You’re wondering how a girl comes around to selling her talent in bed to make a living.”

  “I wasn’t wondering because I don’t think I really want to know.”

  “You’re wondering if I’ve gone back to it—without Neil.”

  “Have you?”

  She turned her face away “There can never be anyone for me until I see Neil, face to face, and he tells me he never wants to have me again.”

 
; “Doesn’t five years tell you anything?”

  “Only that he loves me too much to place me in the position of losing him twice.”

  “A sort of Sir Galahad?” Because of being moonstruck I actually resented a man I’d never met, knew nothing about.

  She looked at me and she saw what it was.

  “I’m asking about him,” I said defensively, “because Chambrun feels we need to know everything we possibly can about him—to help us find him.”

  “Will it help you to find him if I tell you that he was a man of enormous good humor; a realist, unhampered by phony anxieties and guilts; a happy man, good at his profession, good at his relationships with people; a man without vanity. Will any of that help you to spot him, Mark?”

  “No—except that Chambrun may be right. Drury won’t let you run the risk of being used by Chang. He’ll want you out of here. You should do as Chambrun said—run, as far and as fast as you can.”

  “Neil will have to tell me that,” she said.

  I knew she couldn’t be argued out of it. “When did you last see him, actually?” I asked her.

  A look of pain came into her eyes. “We’d been together for almost a year. A wonderful year. I—I’d finally given in; promised I’d marry him. He had to go to New York to do some location shots on a film. When he came back there’d be a few days shooting to finish the film and then we’d be married and go, he promised, on a three months’ holiday to any place that occurred to us on the spur of the moment. There was no hurry about getting married. After all, we were living together as a man and wife live together. He wanted the legal trimmings; they didn’t matter to me.” She closed her eyes for a moment as if to shut away pain. “He came back from New York in high spirits. He’d seen Peter, his best friend, and his family and told them all about me. But all! Nobody had tried to lecture him. He’d had to tell them because somebody else would have passed on the word about me, surely. The final shooting of the film was going to take less time than he’d thought. In a week we’d be off—to the moon, if we chose. Then, in the middle of the night, the phone rang. It was the news from Buenos Aires. Some idiot gave him the gruesome details then and there. I didn’t know it, but I’d seen Neil—my Neil—for the last time the night before.”