Chambrun’s voice was harsh. “So did Mr. Williams,” he said.
Peter turned his head, the black goggles glittering in the sunlight that streamed through the windows.
“Mr. Williams’ extraordinary talent for learning the geography of a room has impressed us both, Mark. But I find myself fascinated by his ability to walk directly to that chair where he’s sitting when it isn’t in the place where he’s learned to expect it to be. No fumbling with his cane, no walking to the right place which this morning is the wrong place.”
Peter sat up very straight in his chair, gripping the heavy blackthorn stick. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“You can see,” Chambrun said. “You made another slip last night that started me wondering.”
“What are you talking about—slip?”
“When we visited Robert Zabielski’s room, the fellow who had the call girl with him, you made a slip. When we left I asked you about him. You were there to listen to his voice, remember? You said, ‘Not possibly Neil. Wrong height, wrong size, wrong voice.’ How could you know he was the wrong height and the wrong size unless you can see?”
“You described him to me before we went there,” Peter said.
“Take off those goggles,” Chambrun said. “We can stand what there is to see there.”
I could feel the hair rising on the back of my neck.
Peter sat very still, gripping the blackthorn. “So I can see a little,” he said, “but what’s behind these glasses isn’t pretty.”
“A new medical miracle?” Chambrun asked. “Eyes that are gouged out replaced by a new set of eyes?” He turned in his chair and reached for a cigarette in the silver box on his desk. “A good many blind people have crossed my path in this business. Some of them are marvelously skillful at compensating for their disaster. But I’ve never seen anyone as good at it as you appeared to be. Tell me, where is the real Peter Williams? Where is the man whose eyes were really gouged out, Mr. Drury?”
I felt as though I’d been hit in the gut by a pile driver. I simply didn’t believe it; Chambrun had to be wrong.
Slowly Peter raised his hands and took off the black goggles. The eyes behind them were narrowed slightly against the sudden bright light, but they were flawless, a cold gray blue. “I could have sworn I had you all fooled a hundred percent,” he said.
“You are Neil Drury?” I asked. It was a vocal croak.
“Yes, Mark. I’m sorry to have had to take you in.” He turned to Chambrun. “If you’ll ask Miss Ruysdale to come in I’ll make a statement for you.”
Chambrun pressed the button on his desk. “It’s for the best, Drury,” Chambrun said. “You couldn’t win, you know. You’ve got a life to live, you’ve got a woman who loves you—a very special woman.”
A nerve twitched in Peter’s—Drury’s—cheek. “Sitting there in your chair, Chambrun, you can never know what this means to me. You can’t even imagine what I feel, what I must have.”
Miss Ruysdale appeared with her notebook. She looked at Drury without emotion. “So you were right,” she said to Chambrun. She must have been in on moving the furniture; known the trap Chambrun was setting. Drury waved to the chair where he’d been sitting. She took it and sat there, waiting, her pencil poised over her notebook. Drury stood behind her.
“This is my statement,” he said. Then something happened. The blackthorn stick came apart in his hand, about eight or ten inches below the handle. “My statement is,” he said, cold and hard, “that this thing in my hand is a very specially designed sawed-off shotgun. It will, if fired, blow a hole in Miss Ruysdale about the size of your hat, Chambrun.”
“Sit very still, Ruysdale,” Chambrun said.
She was motionless. Chambrun sat, cigarette burning between his fingers, smoke curling up, a statue. I felt as if I’d turned to stone myself. We were, I thought, confronted with a madman who was determined to make a five-year dream come true.
“I am going out of here with Miss Ruysdale,” Drury said. “If you try to stop me, if you spread any kind of alarm when I’m gone, if you warn Chang, I promise you, you will have lost a very efficient secretary—and a very nice gal from all I’ve seen of her. I’m sorry to do this to you, Miss Ruysdale, but I can’t let five years of preparation go down the drain simply because Mr. Chambrun came up with answers about an hour too soon. Now, if you will stand up and start toward the door—”
“Listen a minute,” Chambrun said, without moving. “You must realize that—”
“I don’t have time to listen, Mr. Chambrun. You’re a nice guy. I know all the things you have to say because you’ve said them to me as Peter Williams—who is also a nice guy. But you had better damn well play this straight, don’t let on, or Miss Ruysdale will pay the price for your zealous protection of that yellow bastard on the twelfth floor.”
“I don’t care about Chang,” Chambrun said. “It’s you!”
“I don’t care about me, it’s Chang,” Drury said. “Now move, Miss Ruysdale.”
She was looking at Chambrun. She was pale but quite composed. He inclined his head, ever so slightly. She turned and headed for the outer office with Drury directly behind her, his weapon pressed against her back. They were gone, and the door banged shut behind them.
Somehow I got into the action, headed for the phones. “Who first?” I asked. “Wexler? Jerry? Hardy?”
“No one just yet,” Chambrun said. “He’ll do what he threatened.” He brought his fist down on the desk. “I should have known he’d be armed, but I’d seen him searched upstairs by experts!”
“We can’t just sit here!” I said.
“Suggest something, Mark,” he said, bitter. “We’ve got just one good chance, and Jerry should have her here in a few moments. When Laura Malone hears he’s threatening other lives besides Chang’s, innocent lives, she may come down to earth.”
There wasn’t much point in it, but I walked out through Miss Ruysdale’s office to the hall. Between Chambrun’s office and mine at the far end of the hall were half a dozen other offices which housed the bookkeeping and accounting for the hotel. There was the bank of four elevators. There was a stairway leading down to the lobby and a fire stair which eventually exited out onto the street level and into the basement. Drury couldn’t have taken Miss Ruysdale into the offices, holding a gun on her, or down into the lobby, without starting a riot. That meant the elevators or the fire stairs—up or down.
While I stood there trying to pull my wits together, one of the elevator doors opened and Jerry Dodd appeared with Laura in tow. It turned out Chambrun hadn’t lied to her. We had found Drury, God help us. She looked tense and frightened. I didn’t say anything, just gestured them into the office.
Chambrun hadn’t moved from his desk.
Laura looked quickly around the office and showed instant relief. It didn’t last very long.
“Your man has just left here, Miss Malone, holding a sawed-off shotgun on my secretary,” Chambrun said. “If we do anything to interfere with him he promises to kill her. In about forty-five minutes General Chang will come down into the public areas. Drury knows that. If I don’t warn the FBI and alert my own people, he will make his move at Chang. That will almost certainly be the end for him. If I do pass on the warning someone very precious to me may be blown to pieces.”
“Peter Williams?” she asked, her voice unsteady.
“Oh, come on, Miss Malone, let’s stop playing games,” Chambrun said. “You know as well as I do that the man who’s been posing as Peter Williams is your boy. I guessed it. I exposed him. But I didn’t think he was crazy enough to be ready to murder anyone who got in his way.”
“What do you want me to do, boss?” Jerry asked.
“Listen!” Chambrun said, never taking his eyes off Laura, who was suddenly clinging to the back of a chair for support. “This is all much more elaborate than I’d thought. You were always in on it, Miss Malone. Evidently Tolliver, the agent, is in on it. He sent M
ark off to find the phony Peter Williams. That means the real Peter Williams is in on it, too, at least to the point of disappearing so Drury could take his place. Who else, Miss Malone? It is possible that Dr. Coughlin is the surgeon who altered Drury’s face? Because that much is true; his face has been changed. What about Sam Schwartz—because now we know Tolliver would cover for him? What is the plan?”
Laura’s whole body was shaking. “He won’t hurt Miss Ruysdale,” she said. “I know he won’t hurt her!”
“You hope!”
“That butcher upstairs can’t be allowed to go free,” she said, her voice rising. “He has destroyed too many lives. Stay here in your office, Mr. Chambrun; drink your coffee; wait for it to be over and Miss Ruysdale will come back to you unharmed.”
“You have all decided that it’s all right for you to play God with another human life? I don’t care how much of a villain he is, you don’t have the right. You ask me to sit here and let him be murdered without lifting a finger to stop it? That makes me a part of your plot. So I have to stop it!”
“You can’t risk Miss Ruysdale’s life!” I said.
“Miss Malone assures me that he won’t harm Ruysdale,” Chambrun said, never taking his eyes off Laura. “So I call Wexler and Larch and tell them what’s up.” He reached for the phone.
“No, Mr. Chambrun!” Laura cried out.
“So you’re not sure,” Chambrun said. “You’re not sure just how mad he is.”
She lowered her head. “God help me, I’m not sure,” she said.
“Then what’s the plan?”
Laura straightened up. Her eyes brimming with tears. “He’s lived with it for five years,” she said. “He’s lost his career, his life. He’s been hunted by them all that time. Do you understand that? There can never be any peace for him, any security. Chang wins, whatever happens.”
“He’s already committed a murder,” Jerry Dodd said. “He can only burn once. That’s why you can’t risk Miss Ruysdale, boss.”
“He hasn’t committed a murder!” Laura said. “Li Sung,” Chambrun said.
“No!” Laura looked at me. “He was with you, Mark, when it happened.”
I had been thinking about that and it wasn’t so. After our visit from Sung I had left Peter and gone to Chambrun’s office to tell him about it. Then we’d gone up to the twelfth floor to look over the arrangements there. I’d gone back down to my rooms then where Peter—or Drury—was waiting. Maybe forty-five minutes in all. It had never occurred to me then that he could have left the apartment, gone up to the roof, murdered a man, and gotten back. Not without help. He was blind!
But he wasn’t blind. There was no alibi. “He could have done it,” I said. “There was time.”
The little red light on Chambrun’s desk blinked and he picked up the phone. “Chambrun here. … What? Persuade him to wait … because everything isn’t kosher down here. … Persuade him to wait, god damn it!” He put down the phone. “The General is impatient. He wants to move up his schedule. He wants to start down now.” He put both his hands down flat on the desk and leaned forward. “How do we stop this from happening, Miss Malone?” It was so low I could only just hear him.
“I don’t know,” she said. “My part in it was to disappear so that you would concentrate on finding me. I haven’t seen or talked to Neil since then. He was stuck with you.”
“Stuck with us, and learning every move we made, every precaution that was being taken to protect the General,” Chambrun said. “He even got into the General’s suite and saw—we now know—everything there was to see there.”
The little red light blinked again. He pushed the squawk box switch and picked up the phone. We heard Wexler’s voice.
“No dice, Chambrun. The General wants to start down now. You’re to meet him in the ballroom with your banquet manager. What’s not kosher?”
“I think I can identify Drury,” Chambrun said. “I need to make sure he isn’t on stage when you get downstairs.”
“Well, make sure, because we’re starting down,” Wexler said.
“You have the authority to stop him.”
“I wish I knew how to exercise it. Be seeing you.”
Chambrun put down the phone and turned once more to Laura. “Will your bloodthirsty boyfriend kill you to get at the General, Miss Malone? Because that’s the way it’s going to be. He’s going to have to kill you and me to get to Chang.”
Chambrun had a plan of his own. Wexler couldn’t persuade the General to wait, but Chambrun had a way to make him wait. When General Chang and his party of personal guards and the FBI men entered the elevator on the twelfth floor to descend to the lobby, Chambrun was in command. The chief engineer, on orders from Chambrun, stopped the car between floors.
Chambrun, Jerry Dodd and I were down in the lobby when that happened, with Laura in the very tight grip of Jerry’s right hand. There was the usual traffic down there, considerably less and more leisurely than it would be at the lunch hour. Mr. Amato, the banquet manager, armed with lists and menus, sweating with anxiety, was trying to get to Chambrun for a consultation before the upcoming get-together with Chang in the ballroom. Chambrun had no time to talk about fresh salmon from the Coast which was or was not on its way. Mr. Amato, unaware of any anxieties but his own, was wounded when Chambrun told him, sharply, that he had no time for him.
“It’s a touch-and-go situation,” Chambrun said to Jerry and me. “If the General arrives down here ahead of schedule Drury may think I’ve tipped him. I can’t risk that on Ruysdale’s account. So the General will have to cool his heels between floors. Jerry, you and Mark will stay here in the lobby. I can see half a dozen of Larch’s men. Don’t give them any special alerting. It’s got to look to Drury as if everything is routine. Miss Malone and I will go up to the tenth floor. At exactly eleven o’clock the engineer will lower the car with Chang in it, and we’ll join him. When we come out down here in the lobby Miss Malone and I will be walking directly in front of the General. You will stand by the desk, Mark. If you or Jerry have spotted Drury anywhere, give me the V sign.”
“And what then?” Jerry asked.
Chambrun’s lips tightened. “Drury will have to cut his way through me and Miss Malone to get to Chang. At that point we play it by ear.”
“And if he has Miss Ruysdale with him?”
“God help us all,” Chambrun said. “He will be calling the turn then. Well have to wait and see.”
At ten minutes to eleven Chambrun and Laura went up to the tenth floor.
At eight minutes to eleven Miss Ruysdale, looking her customary cool and efficient self, walked into the lobby and came straight toward me where I was positioned at the desk. Jerry, wide-eyed, had seen her and came running.
“It’s all over,” Miss Ruysdale said, calmly.
“Ruysdale!” Jerry shouted at her. “Boy, am I glad to see you. What happened? Where’s Drury?
“Damndest thing,” Miss Ruysdale said. “He was taking me up the fire stairs to God knows where. No conversation except an apology for hurrying me. The fire stairs are walled in, you know. I rounded a corner and I never did see what hit me. A man, I think. He gave me a terrific shove and I went toppling over backwards down a whole flight of stairs. Somersaults, no less. God knows why I have no unbroken bone in my body. I heard Drury shout at someone and then, as the saying goes, everything went blank.”
“But where is he now?” Jerry asked. He was looking at the elevator indicator on the special car. It was at 10.
“He’s in the first-aid room on the ninth floor with one of your men and Dr. Partridge waiting for him to come to,” Miss Ruysdale said. “Whoever pushed me knocked Mr. Drury out cold. At best a concussion, at worst a skull fracture according to Dr. Partridge.”
“And the other man?”
“I never saw him, Jerry. As I say I tumbled down a flight of stairs to the landing. It must have been a minute or so before I came to and tested my arms and legs to find out if I was still in one piece.
I climbed the stairs and there was Drury, out like a light. I got help.”
Jerry let his breath out in a long sigh. “So no fireworks down here,” he said. “The boss is on his way.” He pointed to the indicator which was coming down, floor by floor. It was exactly seven o’clock.
I moved toward the elevator, my arm slipped through Miss Ruysdale’s. I was feeling a hell of a lot better.
The elevator indicator hit 1. The car door opened. Out came two of Chang’s giants flanked by two of Larch’s plainclothes boys. Directly behind them was Chambrun, armlocked to Laura. And behind them, resplendent in his scarlet trimming uniform, was General Chang.
Chambrun looked for me where I should have been, at the desk. Then he saw me and Ruysdale. I gave him the okay sign, thumb and forefinger together. His face lit up at the sight of Ruysdale. He turned and said something to Chang and then he and Laura broke out of the protective phalanx and hurried toward us. From the look on his face I could have sworn that there was something more than office memos between him and Miss Ruysdale.
I was watching them so I didn’t see the beginning of what was a small commotion behind them. I turned and saw that someone was lying prostrate in front of the General’s guards. I guessed that Yuan Yushan had karate-chopped someone else who’d come too close. The guards had drawn their guns and were pointing them at the fallen man. Then another man, ignoring the danger ran forward and knelt beside the fallen man. I recognized Dr. Coughlin.
“Can’t you see he’s a sick man?” Coughlin shouted at the guards. “Help me move him.” I saw it was James Gregory.
It seems to take longer to tell it than the actual time involved. One of Chang’s men and one of the FBI boys broke out of the protective formation and lifted Gregory to one side. Coughlin hurried off, I suppose for his medical bag. Chang and company started forward, and all hell broke loose.
Gregory rolled over on his stomach, very much alive. He was holding a Luger pistol in both hands to keep it steady and he fired, again and again, straight at General Chang’s back. The General seemed to leap into the air and then crumpled in a heap on the floor. The Chinese guards turned and opened fire on Gregory. He bounced around like a bundle of rags. People in the lobby were screaming.
Birthday, Deathday Page 16
